I’m back from the wilderness ! Whenever I see an EMC ETA with the words “Potential Data Unavailability”, I give it immediate attention. Data. Is. Everything. This hot off the press item is titled “ETA 489936: VNX2: A firmware issue may cause certain solid state drives to become faulted, which may result in data unavailability […]
Speed and performance is an important capability of a Data Protection solution. Most people logically attribute this to being able to finish all tasks in a defined “window“. I’ve used CommVault for a long time and it’s one of my all time fav’s. It truly does “what it says on the box”. I’ve also been […]
One thing that is often overlooked after a RecoverPoint solution is implemented is the ongoing Protection Window value for your Consistency Groups. During the design phase, the Journal sizes are (hopefully) diligently and accurately calculated according to your RPO. But as time goes by, how many people actually check that the projected Protection Windows are […]
I’m a big believer in “helping yourself”. By researching and actually doing things, we learn, grow and become more self-sufficient. I’ve blogged before about what I sometimes refer to as hidden gems, in particular MiTrend. There are other tools from EMC that are very useful. The first is My Documents (MyDocs), which is targeted at […]
Another ETA hit my inbox over the weekend, this time relating to VNX/VNX2 and ESXi where a condition that could result in data being unavailable exists. If you are running a VNX and have a code base of 05.32.000.5.219 or earlier or a VNX2 with codebase lower than 05.33.006.5.102 and earlier you may be affected. The […]
Although it’s not mandatory, the Cluster Witness Server (CWS) in a VPLEX Metro Cluster serves a very important purpose as the arbitrator between inter-cluster network partition failures and actual cluster/site failures. It’s a lightweight (<3GB) VMware vm deployed from an OVA that establishes itself in a 3 way VPN between both VPLEX clusters and monitors heartbeats […]
RecoverPoint is one of my favourite products. It’s unique, reliable and has helped me out of trouble on more than one occasion. Whilst most VM admins associate it with SRM and thus Site/LUN/Datastore recovery, it can also fill in an often overlooked gap in data protection. Pre and Post backup coverage. The ability to recover […]
It’s always nice to be able to make bulk changes to multiple devices. Most RecoverPoint environments will have a collection of Consistency Groups that could be as much as 128. To change a common configuration for all of them would take waaaay too long for my liking. A common option to change is the “Managed […]
Storage Pool Expansion on EMC VNX/MCx arrays is a simple, straightforward task that can be done to increase capacity, performance or both. It is an online operation (NDU) but I always try to initiate it when load on an array is non-peak. The process is just like a Fast VP data relocation. Of course there’s […]
Storage Pool Expansion on EMC VNX/MCx arrays is a simple, straightforward task that can be done to increase capacity, performance or both. It is an online operation (NDU) but I always try to initiate it when load on an array is non-peak. The process is just like a Fast VP data relocation. Of course there’s […]