EMC RM
ITS upgraded the flare code on our Clariion SP’s. However, even after being assured by EMC support that this would not break our RM/SE application for our exchange disaster recovery scenario, it actually did break this application. EMC support informed us that we needed to updat our navisphere agent and our navisphere command line interface application that runs on the exchange server and works in tandum with RM/SE. However, upon attempting this installation it actually crashed our exchange back end server. We then called EMC back, and they noticed we needed to apply to non-standard patches. These patches got the application to install, however we still could not create a disaster recovery copy of our exchange environment. Opened another call with EMC, and they informed us that the flare code version we upgraded to on our Clariion is not supported with EMC’s RM/SE, only RM. So we adjusted our priorites to upgrading to RM. EMC sent two individuals and one RM specialists to assist with our upgrade. Upon completion we got a successful copy, but the next day it was broken again. It has consistenly breaking for a week straight with the same error. EMC has been on site for five days straight, and we will be here again today investigating root causes, and attempting to provide fixes.
SUN L700
The SUN Storagetek L700 has been having a whirlwind of phyiscal device failures. First the gripper on the robot failed, and SUN came out and replaced it. Ths L700 ran without flaw for about 4 hours before it was offline again. Opened another case with SUN, and they came out and replaced the MPC board for the unit. Once the new MPC board was in place, we had to replicate the configuration for the L700 on the new MPC board. Once we had all configurations in place, the L700 returned to normal operations. Later in the month a tape drive failed, and SUN replaced that as well.
It seems as if the stability our L700 is minimal at best. This seems to be caused by normal usage over the lifetime of this device. It may be time to look into life cycle replacement for this unit.
IMSP Retirement
ITS has agreed to develop tools to assist in the retirement of the IMSP service. This tool is an on demand address book export. It provides the capability for a user to authenticate and choose whether to export their email contacts out of IMSP into either the webmail database or a TAB Delimited file ready for import to exchange. This tool is ~ 70% complete. It currently has the ability to authenticate a user and get the indivudal email contacts. There are two major task left to complete this effort. 1) Automated file copy – the LINUX team is getting me an SSH server built on the IMSP server to assist in an automated file copy process to get the users flat text file address book from IMSP to the web server running the tool. 2) further code modifications to the tool that allow the export of distribution lists as well as individual contacts.