VU Blog

I took the SNIA SCSP test this month and passed.

EBA Evaluation:I have been working with EMC to conduct another evaluation of the EBA product. I have experienced several issues implementing it in our environment. The software was unable to monitor any of our network connections without a patch that they had to develop for us during this process. We have also been unable to monitor our fiber ports on the backup servers. It appears the cause of this problem is the absence of some SNIA libraries. Unfortunately, these libraries are included with vendor drivers for the HBAs and we currently use the Redhat provided drivers built into the kernel instead of vendor drivers. I am reluctant to switch to vendor drivers now that we have resolved several scsi issues we were having in the past within our tape library environment. We have also been unable to monitor our tape library with this product. The issue appears to be an SNMP problem and we are still trying to ascertain what is causing this issue. Finally the final issue is that the product doesn’t appear to be giving me the level of detail I had hoped to see for problem identification and resolution. Our main reason for evaluating this product again was for the ability to identify, locate, and resolve issues within our backup environment. Perhaps we will see more of this type of utility once we get some of the other issues resolved.

BlueArc Performance issues:

We have seen a drastic change in our usage pattern on the BlueArc NAS appliance. We went from a max utilization of around 50% to being maxed out almost continuously for several days at a time. The culprit appears to be an increase in usage from the ACCRE cluster, but I am still working with the vendor to make sure this is the actual cause and not a system problem of some kind.

Backup Operations:

Finally, backup has been going pretty well this month. The numerous changes to the environment last month appear to have stabilized the application and the tape library maintenance has addressed the stability of our library. This month has been primarily spent addressing bottle necks within our backup infrastructure. We also have two new servers on site to be configured as additional storage nodes.