A Collection of Links

Just a quick note regarding our Nexenta storage solution. Sunday afternoon a few weeks back (why do these things always happen on weekends) we had a truck knock over a utility pole just down the street from our office and we lost power to the building. Our server room contains one badly underpowered UPS with no generator backup so it wasn't long before everything in the room was shut down. I cancelled my plans, headed into the office and waited for power to get restored, then proceeded to power everything back up (This is always a nerve wracking time). All went well with one exception - Nexenta reported being unable to see any disks in my array and therefore failed to mount any shares. All our data drives are housed in our Super Micro 836E2-R800B JBOD Chassis. I headed into the server room and the system light was on but no lights on any of the drives. Rebooting the Nexenta head unit did not resolve the issue. After a 20 minutes of high anxiety I noticed the power supplies...

OK I'm stuck at work for a few more minutes waiting for a job to finish so I'll throw out a bit of info regarding my newly built Nexenta storage platform. Based in part from sticker shock looking at Dell or HP low end storage devices as well as on the advice from Mike from over at IPHouse.net, I bought some Super Micro parts and built the storage cluster myself. I started with a 836E2-R800B 3U chassis just for housing the disks. I wonder if there is some kind of cheat sheet for Super Micro products because it seems confusing as hell. I will clue you in that the E2 on the end signifies dual input/output SAS connections. The SAS connections plug into a Super Micro 6016T-NTRF4+ 1U Server. I'm sad to say that I have absolutely no idea what all those letters signify. I just picked the one Mike picked (although I've since ordered another server with a different config so I can start to compare). I stuck 2 Intel E5620 processors in it, 12GB of DDR3 RAM and a coupl...

We are in the process of migrating our backup solution over to Microsoft Data Protection Manager 2010 and ran into an issue that other might find useful. Although it's early days, overall I'm very pleased with the product. We are a MS only shop so it's a good logical fit for us. We are using an IBM TS3200 tape library for our tape storage connected via FC. I installed DPM, configured the FC switch fabric and then I just went into Management/Libraries and hit Rescan. DPM found the library but just identified it as a single tape drive, not the library. Off to the IBM support website for their usual cryptic search led to proper drivers (IBMTape.x64_w08_6209.zip). Installed the drivers and hit Rescan in DMP and just like that DPM recognized the library. So far so good. The Inventory library option worked like a charm discovering all the tapes in the library, however when we tried to do any other option such as erase or identify unknown tape the entire DPM console wo...

I suppose at this point it is pretty well established among my friends that I love to travel. Well addicted might be a more accurate description. As a frequent traveler I do get to experience the joys of First/Business Class travel. While I'm no longer awestruck to find myself there, the richness of my memories still surprise me. This is most visible (or I guess audible) to me in the strange connection of certain songs to specific trips. As much as I struggle with remembering things, I'm always a little astonished at how strongly a specific song can place me in an exact point in time. The most vivid of all of these memories seem to take place in a first class cabin. Maybe it's because I can totally relax, while not actually able to 'go' anywhere, that allows my mind to fully absorb these memories. It's strange, because often these songs that end up holding such a special place in my heart are not songs I would normally include in my favorites. The most...