Isilon, what is it?

Posted on February 1, 2012 by sangeek

Now that I am a recent Isilon Certified Storage Professional I am frequently asked: “So what is it?”, “Is it easy?”, “What does it do?”, “Is it right for me?”

So what is it?

Isilon is a cluster-based storage array that is based off of industry standard hardware, highly modified FreeBSD, and can scale to a massive 15PB’s in a single filesystem using it’s OneFS filesystem.

Data Protection is formed using mathematical algorithms instead of using traditional RAID 5, etc etc.  When a file is written it is spread across all nodes using parity calculated by which level you set the whole or parts of the cluster to using a Reed Solomon error correction coding.

What does that mean to you Mr. Storage Admin?  Well it means you are spending less time carving out luns and more time looking like a hero to your managers.

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Visual Lessons of Teamwork

Posted on November 21, 2011 by sangeek

903.  A number.  A number of wins.  A feat accomplished by a person who has a broad impact across so many people and lives. A family.  A basketball family.  Last week Mike Krzyzewski accomplished something in Men’s NCAA basketball.  He passed his mentor, Bob Knight in achieving 903 wins (Pat Summitt holds the NCAA College Record for Men’s and Women’s basketball at 1071+ wins Coaching for the Lady Vols at Tennessee).  Duke played my Alma Matter, Michigan State in a game that even though I wanted MSU to win, I certainly respect as a college basketball fan what Coach K. has done.

With the success that Coach K has had, there has been obstacles along the way.  When he first took the job at Duke he had a conference record of 13-29 in his first 3 years.  This would have possibly had most athletic directors, alumni, and students calling for his ousting but Duke stuck with him and over the next few years those humble beginnings turned into a national program that still remains a force to be reckoned with.  A lesson for us all in life that even humble beginnings can result in greatness.

I believe what provides this greatness isn’t the individual but the team and how lessons can be taught.  The most powerful form of communication in the world is imagery.  Images can teach, images can make you happy, images can make you cry and images can form memories that last a lifetime.  Images can break cultural barriers and images can insult cultures.  Coach K uses many images in his coaching toolbox at Duke but I think that two of these images stand out to me when thinking about teamwork.

The first image is the hand and the fist.  Hold out your hand…you see five fingers.  Each of those fingers are individual but if you form a fist it is much more powerful.  Five fingers working together to form a fist will always be stronger than its individual parts.  A team working together will always be stronger than silos of team members or individuals trying to tackle a task alone.

The second image is the wheel.  You have the outside of the wheel with many spokes and the hub in the center.  The coach is the hub, the spokes are the teammates.  Forming together as a single wheel, the leader (the coach) at the center.  With good leadership, even if the coach is not there the wheel still continues to roll down the hill.

What do these images represent?  I believe they are a very simple way of thinking about leadership.  Leadership does not have to be complicated.  Teamwork does not have to be complicated either.  Let your teams work together, break down the silos and create a wheel of your own.  You never know what could happen.  You too can become a champion.

 

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vSphere 5 Home Lab: Part 2 – Newegg Ordering Goodness (Node 1 – Mulder)

Posted on November 17, 2011 by sangeek

I love Newegg for decent prices….  After much debate I decided to go ahead and get started on Node 1 in which I will name “Mulder”.  “Scully” is going to have to wait a couple weeks until after my Thanksgiving hangover wears off a bit and I get the lab all setup and ready to go.  Here is what is going to show up tomorrow in my driveway. Prices and Linkage included in case you want to build you own fairly nice Quad Core vSphere 5 node in the comfort of your own sweatpants at home:

$109.99
Looking forward to the unboxing tomorrow!!!!  WITH PICTURES!
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vSphere 5 Home Lab: Part 1 : Storage and Blue Lights!

Posted on November 15, 2011 by sangeek

Inspiration! It what brings us together to achieve great things. Home Labs! Great way to use resources and gain lab time on products while working on my own schedule!

At Varrow yesterday we were given the inspiration and support to build out our own home labs. I as a storage engineer really need one. With VSA’s from Isilon and VNX, it will give me the opportunity to test things before going to customer sites, try out crazy configurations and really get to know something while accomplishing a sort of frankensteinish lab in the process.

EMC PLEASE RELEASE THE VMAX VSA

Sorry Had to do that…I am primarily a Symmetrix Engineer so it would be nice to have one running at home…so in the interim for my lab, I bought a storage array that looks like one! Only it is very small, weighs a couple pounds and only supports 2 x SATA drives. A D-Link DNS-320 NAS Array!

To top off my EXTREME infrastructure I needed to upgrade from my old 100MB switch to some full on 1000MB. I went with the Cisco SF 100D-08 8 Port Small business switch.

Server/CPU I’m going to followup in a week or so after Turkey Day….

Old:

New:

Here are some shots of the internals, hard drives, etc:

Before Hard Drives…they just slide right in:

Here it is with stuff plugged in:

Here it is, plugged in BLUE LIGHTS SHOWING on top of my Dell GX620 (MythTV database box which I’ll probably mention later):

Performance from my Ubuntu Linux box connected directly to switch, NAS connected to switch… Not bad considering the NAS is a single 1GB link and it only cost about $99, a fraction of the cost of a VMAX 🙂

Here it is using IOZONE w/ 5 threads of 500meg files with a 64k record.

“Output is in Kbytes/sec”

” Initial write ” 17733.74

” Rewrite ” 17288.42

” Read ” 26911.20

” Re-read ” 29090.55

” Reverse Read ” 23024.59

” Stride read ” 98985.24

” Random read ” 1982285.77

” Mixed workload ” 1157524.75

” Random write ” 8258.36

” Pwrite ” 17066.91

” Pread ” 26523.35

So there you have it! Pretty Cool eh? Oh and did you spot the Roomba? His name is Carlitos…he keeps my office clean from harmful particles to my extreme vSphere 5 Home Lab.

-sangeek

Posted in configurations, vsphere | 3 Comments

Veteran’s Day, 2011

Posted on November 12, 2011 by sangeek

As a US Army Vet myself, I sometimes look back and think of my time serving this great country.  I came across this video a few years back.  It is one of my favorites.  Please take 5 minutes to watch.  It is well worth it.  Thank you to all of the veterans that served before me, continue to serve and future Veterans.  I salute you.

“That’s what we do.  We’re Americans”

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VMAX Hump Day – A discussion on SMC and GUI Design

Posted on August 24, 2011 by sangeek

Happy VMAX Hump Day!  I actually typed this last night, but I like the idea of publishing things on Wednesday to get you over the hump. Should I make this a series?

I’ve noticed the lack of VMAX blogging out there.  In fact…I’ve also noticed the lack of MY blogging lately.  I think it is because my head has been buried lately in the “EMC Solutions Enabler Symmetrix CLI Quick Reference”  And by quick, EMC means that they print out the help information for every possible combination of commands you can do with symcli commands and leave you to decipher what there complex strings of flags, variables, etc mean.  Is it a useful guide?  Yes.  Will it make your head hurt? Yes.

Continue reading →

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What do 80’s Rock Bands have to do with Competition?

Posted on June 11, 2011 by sangeek

In the IT service industry or specifically in the IT storage arena it is very clear to some what their biggest competitors are or are not.  If DL(Def Leppard) Inc. gets word that VHS(Van Halen Storage) inc. now supports RAID 5150, DL starts pouring a little sugar on what RAID 5150 is. The marketing department then takes over and suddenly their version called RAID HYSTERIA is better than VHS’s RAID 5150.  The customer is left confused, bewildered and forced to take sides investing in either company.  Is this what you want for your customer?  Shouldn’t you be competing against customer satisfaction and not amongst yourselves?

I know it’s crazy to think about sometimes.  Without competition, how would anyone survive?  “In basketball, no one would be successful without competition!”, you would say.  I would give you the Harlem Globetrotters.  They have been entertaining their customers in one form or another since 1926 and are very good at what they do.  Are their customers happy?  I would think so.

“In the pharmaceutical industry, there must clearly be competition, Sangeek!”, and I would give you AMGEN.  When asked what competitors they had they responded with statements like:

“We’re in competition with cancer”,  “Maybe our competition is flammatory disease, such as arthritis.  Obesity, Parkinson’s.” and “We might be in competition with untimely death—human disease. I guess we’re not really targeting starvation or war” (Login,King,Fischer-Wright, 2008)

This had me thinking. In the IT service industry, what is our real competition?  I believe statements from AMGEN are very admirable goals to have, but what can make an IT Service company or even an individual in that company stand out from the rest of the competition?  By taking that further, how can we as an organization or tribe CHANGE the industry and do what is important?

I can think of a few!

“Our biggest competition is making sure our customers are happy at the end of every day”

“Maybe our biggest competition would be finding other solutions to enable our customers to be more efficient”

“Our biggest competitor is normalcy”.

That last one.  Think about it. What is normal?  Normal is comforting and stable but by continuing to break out of the mold we can make a new ‘Normal’ and continue to compete with it to make things better for ourselves and our customers.

I was thinking about this a lot this week when I was brought on by a challenge.  I was tasked to do.  Asking questions of the “Normal” support channel were just coming up with dead ends and lack of answers.  I then thought to myself, “Self, who can you talk to that actually knows this answer?” Within the course of a couple of hours and a short conversation with an old friend I found an answer.  I was able to reach out to people ‘outside’ the normal support channel by using my relationships and ultimately was able to satisfy the customer.

All I’m asking of you, my dear blog readers is this.  Take time to think about what you are doing right now.  Are you competing with something?  Or should you be thinking about the greater good?  Each one of these things can produce great products however only one can really give you true inner satisfaction in your career, your personal life and truly make a difference in other people’s lives.

Oh and if you haven’t read it yet, please read: Tribal Leadership by By Dave Logan, John Paul King, Halee Fischer-Wright.  You can even download the audiobook if you have a lot of time in the car.

 

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Cache Flushing Toilet Flushing

Posted on May 30, 2011 by sangeek

Cache Flushing Toilet Flushing – An introduction to what controller cache does, in a way everyone can understand.

The other day I wanted to explain to some people what forced cache flushing was and why it was a bad thing.  This happened while working a few hours helping a colleague tune a CLARiiON Array that was performing poorly because of this.  For some reason I decided that the best way to explain a technical concept to someone is to find something that they do in everyday life and make parallels to the technical concept I am talking about.  Fortunately or unfortunately to my colleague at work and later on my wife, I explained this concept using toilets.

All bathroom humor set aside, Cache is a great thing that most modern storage arrays have.  When things are working correctly, data gets written to cache, and acknowledgement sent to the host that the write is complete and then data is flushed out of the cache and written to disk.    In normal operation, this is a very good thing and allows data to be written in an efficient manner.  The problem can happen when you have a rouge host trying to do too many reads or writes to a group of disks that cannot keep up with what the cache is sending it.  This causes many problems to include Dirty Pages and forced flushing.  If this prolongs over a long period of time the whole array ends up writing most if not all data directly to disk to compensate for not being able to quickly write out to cache to send acknowledgement to the host.

Your toilet is a great thing that most modern households have.  When things are working correctly, “data” gets put into the toilet, and acknowledgement is sent to the host that your “data” is correctly in the toilet.  Once you acknowledge that the “write” is complete, you press a button and your “data” is now written to the City Sewer system.  In normal operation this is a very good thing and makes you happy when all goes well.  The problem comes when you have some very dirty pages, “data” that hasn’t gone to disk come checkpoint time and you need to flush again.  If it gets written to the city sewer the second time around, that is good but if it doesn’t you need to take out a plunger and “force flush” the “data”.  Now imagine a house full of 100 hosts that need to complete their “data” writing at the same time…

Now you see why force flushing and dirty pages are bad not only in your house, but on your storage array.    -Sangeek

 

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What does the Antarctic have in common with a new job?

Posted on May 7, 2011 by sangeek

While I don’t claim to be an Arctic explorer, I do think that I am on the verge of something special, something in the era of Storage, Virtualization and Cloud Computing age that has not been found yet by many companies.  What that is, I’m not quite sure but I hope by taking a leap in the direction of a company in which encompasses my own values and passion I will reach what I am looking for faster.

Twitter like newspaper ads of the past I had learned is a good way to hear about new opportunities.  For example, here is the text from an add in the early 1900’s that wanted to find people to join an Antarctic expedition:

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.” – Ernest Shackleton, Sometime around 1900″

And here is the Tweet I saw early January in which I responded to:

“Any Storage Linchpins out there looking for a career change? We need you, our customers need you, apply within..dont be shy. #Varrow#EMC” @virtualtacit Jan 4, 2011

I love history.  History exists to teach us how to live our lives going forward.  What we can learn from Antarctic exploration is that eventually, as we keep trying something we will eventually reach our goals or inspire those to reach them for us in the future.  Ernest Shackleton indeed never reached Antarctica, however he did bring a crew of men to the bitter cold and was stranded about 16 miles from his goal.  What he did afterwards is what was amazing.  He took the lifeboat leaving his crew behind, sailed almost 500 miles away and back to eventually bring his whole crew home, safe.  This epic journey inspired hundreds to try and eventually live in this harsh climate.  As of today over 30 countries have permanent research stations located in Antarctica, a testament to the early explorations done by Shackleton and others.

“How Shackleton maintained his men’s morale while stranded for months on the ice and when there seemed no hope of rescue, eventually bringing all of them home safe and sound, is now seen as an achievement unique in the history of exploration.” – James Caird Society

This coming week I start at Varrow. Whilst I can’t claim that Varrow will provide the danger (except during dodgeball tournaments during the Quarterly Oil Changes) that times of past exploration had, I do believe it is now time to explore myself as a person and my abilities as an Storage Engineer.  Varrow is the leader in storage, virtualization and disaster recovery.  They do this by hand picking top engineering, sales and operational talent to support customers throughout the South East United States.   They truly are a VALUE Added Reseller and understand what the V means in VAR.  I experienced this first hand at Varrow Madness earlier this year and you can also see some of the customer testimonials on Varrow’s ‘Our Customers’ section on their or should I say our website.

I am looking forward to the coming weeks, months and years and what holds in this period of self exploration of myself and my abilities in my career.

“You hear the call or you do not, but if you do, you have to experience it.” – Donald Sutherland – The Last Continent,  2008

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When it comes to power, why are we stuck in the stone age?

Posted on March 24, 2011 by sangeek

I came across this awesome video that discusses energy production, how much energy we use and why it is important to invest in technologies that can power the world 30+ years from now.

In short, there is a professor at MIT, Dan Nocera who does a great job of explaining how energy is made, and how his team of students produced a device that would power a house off the grid for a day on about 2 liters of water and sunlight.  He discovered this by studying how nature converts sunlight and water into energy.  And he did this all for about $100 worth of materials. There is a lot of content in this video, and it explains how we’ve gone from a society that has used mainframes then PCs then laptops and so-fourth, but we are still running these things off of a power grid that was designed before mainframes.

Imagine what this could do for people in not so developed parts of the country? Imagine what this could do for cloud computing? The video is about 20 minutes long, but well worth the watch. Nocera is an excellent speaker.

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