VU Blog

Projects:

Vuspace 3:

In addition to the three products we are considering currently (Documentum, Xythos, and Windows Cluster) we evaluated a number of free solutions this month. We have created a feature matrix of all the products we have considered and hope to present it for final resolution sometime soon.
Operational:

• We upgraded the firmware to the latest versions in our SAN environment this month. The upgrade of our first 9509 SAN director caused a reboot that was not expected. Luckily, we have a redundant SAN fabric in the Hill Center and no serious consequences were seen as a result. The upgrade of the second 9509 SAN director went much better. The upgrade went as expected and no outage was seen as a result on that switch. The 9216 upgrade in Stevenson went as expected, and we had no unintended impacts from the upgrade due to help from the ESX team.
• This month we added an IBM Blade Center to our environment. The blade center included an internal Cisco SAN switch module. We ISL’d it into our environment and presented storage through it to the blade center for evaluation.
• I was tasked with writing a script this month to gather Imap statistics. The request was for mail messages < 90 days, 90-120 days, and > 120 days old. The total size on disk for each category as well as a tally was needed. I used Perl and wrote a recursive subroutine to handle the arbitrary file structures possible within mailboxes. The whole thing worked pretty slick, all that was needed as a few additional code blocks to handle special cases such as special characters. One of the most difficult to address being mailbox sub-folders with a single character space ‘ ‘. As the full name of the sub-folder.
• In the RMSE environment this month I tested and then Tony implemented the Admsnap upgrade that was the last hurdle before we could perform the Clariion firmware upgrades. The RMSE environment should now be compatible with FLARE 24 making our coming upgrade after the first of the year possible.
• The rest of the month was spent doing troubleshooting on the BlueArc for various issues and routine work connecting new hosts to our Storage environment. We had multiple new ESX hosts connected to our storage environment this month. The ESX environment is now using storage from 2 frames and is our fastest growing Storage consumer in our environment currently.