That is the question.

Many things are technically possible in this world, but that doesn’t always mean they are a good idea. My motorbike is good for > 250km/h, but it’s not something I do without first thinking very hard about my licence and the nagging I’m going to get if I end up in jail.

The same goes for expanding an array. Yes, array expansion is technically possible and works just fine in the right situations, but at times you have to ask yourself … is this a good idea?

Recently a customer of mine was thinking of purchasing a 24-port RAID card to make a very large archive server. The immediate thought process was to start with 12 disks in a RAID 6, then over a period of time add 2-3 drives and expand the array to encompass the new disks.

This would mean at least 4 raid expansion processes during the life of the server. Yes, this is possible, but no, it’s not really recommended.

During an array expansion things can and sometimes do go wrong. Now if a drive fails, that’s not so much of a problem. The expansion will finish and the array will be in a degraded state. But if you have major power outages or other unforseen problems (like a bunch of disks playing up because they are having to work hard for the first time in their lives) there is the possibility of things going completely pear-shaped.

Now if you are doing 2-drives out to 3 drives, or if you are doing 4-drives out to 6 drives, I’d be comfortable living with that sort of sizing arrangement. But if you have 12 x 2tb sata drives and are adding another 4 then your timeframe for the expansion is going to be very, very large. Depending on how large the load is on the server this could take 3-4 days.

While it will work, that’s 3-4 days where you risk something going wrong and causing you major headaches. I’m a strong believer in Murphy’s Law (what can go wrong will) so this would concern me greatly.

I personally think you would be better off buying another 12 drives, migrating your data to another server or devices, then blowing the existing server away, building a new array on 24 drives (and I’d probably go for a RAID60 on that number of drives) then putting your data back on the server.

Then again, I tend to worry more than others. It does, however, bear thinking about when doing expansions on very, very large arrays - is it really not worth it?

Ciao
Neil

You may be surprised when looking in Adaptec Storage Manager on some machines to find the array and drives with a green background.

Did our programmers just get bored? (not likely)

The green behind an array indicates that the array is under power management. This means that after the administrator has set the necessary timers for each array, the card will watch the activity to and from the drives. When there is no activity for a set period of time the card will take action to either slow the drives or spin them down.

The drives show a green background when they are spun down.

If you are looking for this effect and can’t see the green background, look in the view menu and make sure the checkbox “power management” is ticked.

This is a great way of saving a few dollars - in fact quite a few over the life of a server. I set my server for 30 minutes inactivity to slow the drives. After 1 hour of no activity the card will spin the drives down. The end result of all this trickery is that my server spends a large amount of time with the drives spun down, saving Adaptec a great deal of electricity (take note Boss).

So are you saving yourself or your customers money? It’s a feature worth looking at (Series 2, 5 and 6).

Ciao
Neil

A little while ago I said I thought that pure SAS drives would go the way of the dodo.
Well Seagate has put a kybosh on that little theory. They have released a 900Gb 2.5″ 10K SAS drive (full SAS, not hybrid).

That’s one heck of a drive.
You can find the details at: http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/enterprise-ssd-hdd/savvio-10k/

Wow.
Neil

This is another excerpt from our “Maintenance Best Practices for Adaptec RAID Solutions” document. I can’t claim credit for this document, but I’m pretty sure there’s nothing illegal about plagiarising our own documentation

A “verify with fix” is a single, quick check of the array. After the verification process has checked all sectors of the array, it stops and will not start again until started manually by the administrator. In manual mode, the verification process commands are given a higher priority than in Auto mode so that the check completes significantly faster.

Verify with fix is a data-level check and requires more controller resources to read and compare data. Also, because of the additional resources required, verify with fix is not designed to run continuously. Rather, it should be scheduled to run at a regular interval, preferably during periods of low drive activity, or during system maintenance.

To verify and fix a logical drive using Adaptec Storage Manager:

a. In the Logical Devices View, right-click the logical drive.

b. Select Verify with fix and confirm that you want to verify

c. To begin the verification immediately, click Yes. To schedule the verification, click Schedule, and then set the date and time. You can also choose to set the verification as a recurring task.

While the verification is in progress, the logical drive is shown as an animated icon to indicate that the task is in progress. When the verification is complete, an event notice is generated in the local system’s event log.

The full story on maintenance best practices for your array can be found at:
http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/miscellaneous_support/Adaptec_RAID_Maintenance_Best_Practices_v2b.pdf

Note: Don’t do this during a working day … your users will be less than impressed. However you should schedule this for a quiet period in your working week (eg 2am Sunday morning). Storage Manager makes it easy to run this check on a regular basis (scheduling) without you haveing to get up at some ungodly hour on Sunday morning to make sure your arrays are in tip top shape.

Ciao
Neil

This handy tip is part of a larger document that one of our very knowledgeable people put together. It’s part of our “best practices” to ensure that your system performs to it’s utmost for the longest period of time.

Adaptec Storage Manager can be configured to send email messages (or notifications) about events on a system in your storage space. We recommend doing this if your storage space is not managed by a dedicated person, or if that particular system is off-site or not connected to a monitor. Email notifications can help you monitor activity on your entire storage space from any location, and are especially useful in storage spaces that include multiple systems running the Adaptec Storage Manager Agent only.

To set up email notifications:

a. In the Configure menu (on the tool bar), select the system you want, and then select Email Notifications.

b. The Email Notifications window opens. The SMTP Server Settings window opens if you haven’t set up email notifications previously.

c. Enter the address of your SMTP server and the “From” address to appear in email notifications. If an email recipient will be replying to email notifications, be sure that the “From” address belongs to a system that is actively monitored.

d. Click OK to save the settings.

e. In the Email Notifications window tool bar, click Add email recipient. The Add Email Recipient window opens.

f. Enter the recipient’s email address, select the level of events for which the recipient will receive an email, and then click Add. Repeat this Step to add more email recipients. Click Cancel to close the window.

This simple tool will help you monitor your systems and allow you to take action when something goes wrong … rather that waiting for a second drive to fail and all hell to break loose.

You can find the full document (which I’ll be plagiarising further in this blog) at:
http://download.adaptec.com/pdfs/miscellaneous_support/Adaptec_RAID_Maintenance_Best_Practices_v2b.pdf

Ciao
Neil

Once upon a time we had batteries to protect the cache on a RAID card. Protecting cache on the card is an important issue, especially in enterprise servers. When the OS writes data to the disks it actually goes to the RAID card. If write cache is turned on, then the card takes the data into the cache and reports back to the OS that the data has been written. The card then in turn writes the data to the disk when the disks are available (which is only a short period of time).

The end result of all this is that there is almost always data in the cache that the OS thinks has been written to disk, but is still waiting to be written to the disk. If the power goes out at this point in time then that data will be lost as RAID card cache is DDR (needs power to protect it).

The old-school way of doing this was to put a lithium ion battery on the RAID card which kept power to the DDR. This battery would keep the data alive for as long as the battery had power.

Quite some time ago Adaptec decided there was a better way of handling this. For lots of reasons batteries are a pain in the proverbial. They go flat, they don’t last, they have limited shelf-life, short warranties and long charge times, but they were all we had so everyone told you they were a good thing.

So, we developed what we call ZMCP or “Zero Maintenance Cache Protection”. This basically comes in the form of a small circuit board attached to the card, and a tethered supercapacitor. The daughter board has 4gb nand flash onboard. Basically, when the power goes out the data that is the DDR is copied to the nand flash where it is safe for years (the power to do this is provided by the supercap). When the drives come back up the data is copied from the nand flash to the drives where it was meant to go.

Now this post is not about that technology, but more about how we have marketed and implemented it. This technology was developed when the 5 series controller was our flagship, so we made a new model of card (due to connector restraints) and called it a “Z” card … in other words the 5 series controller has a “Z” on the end (eg 5805Z).

Then along came the 6 series. Adaptec made a conscious decision that ZMCP was a better way to go than batteries for lots of reasons (number one being it has a 3-year warranty compared to 1 year for batteries) and decided that this technology would be the only option we offer for cache protection on our 6 series cards.

Therefore, if all cards use this “ZMCP” technology there is no need to put a “Z” on the end of the card, right? Logically you’d think so. So you look at the 6 series product lineup and you don’t find a “Z” anywhere. If you look on the pricelists you won’t find a battery anywhere either. You’ll find a thing called an AFM600 (stands for Adaptec Flash Module). This is the ZMCP cache protection that fits natively on every 6 series card.

Sounds simple to me (or at least it did to our marketing people), but the world doesn’t get it.

Therefore the bottom line is …

If you have an Adaptec 6 series RAID controller and want to protect the cache, there is no battery option.
The only option you have is to put an AFM600 on the card which is our “Zero Maintenance Cache Protection”.

Confused? If not great, if yes then join the rest of the world

Ciao
Neil

That’s one way of putting it. I’ve noticed current SSD drives are not being listed as SLC, MLC or eMLC, but instead Intel, for example, call their new 510 drive models “multi-level cell compute-quality components”. Now in my reading that’s MLC-based NAND flash.

However drive vendors are moving away from SLC/MLC variants towards eMLC (Enterprise MLC). This new memory is supposed to give approximately a 30% write-endurance improvement over the original MLC derivative. So is the above drive “eMLC” or “MLC” (or something totally different).

Complicating matters further is the fact that vendors are moving towards higher-density memory (34nm, 25nm, 18nm) which apparently reduces the life span of the memory.

All of this leads to a confusing time for the end user. What drives are right by my enterprise system? What drive technologies should I steer clear of for my mission-critical server?

As it stands at the moment, those are pretty hard questions to answer. My only hope is that somewhere down the track we can just move towards a single standard for SSD drives, and a standardised measurement method for read speed, write speed and endurance. The disk vendors seem to have this fairly well organised for spinning platters - so why can’t the SSD boys get their act together.

I know this is a fast-moving market segment, but I’m sure vendors are losing sales in the enterprise space simply because customers can’t work out whether a certain drive will in fact be safe to use in their servers.

Come on lads - remember the KISS principle.

Ciao
Neil

Folks,

If you want to see something funny, take a look at the attached youtube link. I was at Intel’s Developer Forum in Beijing and after two days of standing on my feet and answering questions a nice young lady came up and asked me to explain maxCache to her.

The technology explanation worked well enough - I just couldn’t remember the name of my employer!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COsN74YL9HM

Ciao
Neil

I’ve just recently returned from China where I found a great deal of interet in all things SSD when it comes to storage. Much of our discussions centred on “what is the best use of SSD” and “where should I use SSD” and “how does Adaptec handle SSD”?

That got me thinking enough about this subject that I sat down and put a powerpoint presentation together just to deal with this issue. I’ve basically broken SSD usage into 4 areas, but I’m wondering if there are other uses that the IT community is thinking of that I haven’t considered. He’s my two cents worth …

Pure SSD environments
This sort of implementation is for those with deep pockets and the ultimate need for speed. Pure 6gb SSD (SLC of course) is the fastest storage system you can get today. Combine a 6gb card with good quality 6gb SLC SSDs and you have the best of the best. Of course cost is a major consideration, and it’s hard to get capacity using these drives, but you will get the best performance possible.

This sort of implementation pushes the RAID card to it’s limits, but that’s a good thing because our cards have been bored to death waiting for SATA drives for a long time now.

Pure SSD and SATA combination environments
This sort of implementation makes a lot more sense to me. Everyone has the need for speed, but also the need for large capacity. However not many people have the need for very fast large amounts of storage. So it makes sense to use a small number of SSDs to make a storage volume for your fast data and a large volume of SATA disks for all the other stuff that you need to store on your server.

The downside to this sort of implementation is management of your data. You have to work out what goes where and manage the capacities, making sure you are making the best use of your SSD investment.

Hybrid RAID environments
This is really a niche area of SSD use. In the past if I asked you to make a mirror from an SSD and a SATA drive you’d think I’m a few sandwiches short of a picnic. However on our RAID cards these days if you create a mirror from an SSD and a SATA drive, the card will write to both drives to protect the data, but only read from the SSD, giving blazing read performance. So write speed is not really impacted, but read speed goes up dramatically.

I’m finding people really interested in this for very small specialised servers such as Terminal Servers, and for high-end workstations where it takes a long time to build the software on the server … you don’t want to have a single drive in that machine because if it fails the cost of rebuilding the machine is more than the cost of the drive in the first place.

SSD as caching environments
This is my favourite and I consider it the best of both worlds. Having a large number of SATA drives in a pool, with an SSD drive (or two or three) acting as read cache for that pool, dramatically increases the random read speed of the drive pool.

This means that your random read speeds improve while the SATA drives handle the rest of the data flow such as sequential reads and writes and random writes. Management is a no-brainer as the card works out what should be cached and just handles the decision-making process for you.

So there’s 4 examples of SSD usage that I’m seeing on a day to day basis. What are you doing?

BTW: I recently saw a press release from a major drive vendor releasing 400gb 6Gb SSD drives to the market. While I don’t know the price of these yet, this has to have a major impact on the SAS drive market. Why use a very hot, very expensive, power hungry drive when you can use something that is faster, 2.5″, doesn’t get hot and doesn’t vibrate? Surely this is looking like the death of the SAS drive (or is it too early to make that call).

Finally, after going back and re-reading this for spelling errors, I notice that I hadn’t answered one of my questions at the top … “How does Adaptec handle SSDs” … the answer to that is simple. A drive is a drive is a drive. To our hardware RAID controllers (which are SAS controllers), a drive is simply a drive. We don’t care whether it’s a SATA, SAS, SSD (SATA or SAS) etc, to us it’s just a drive and we’ll run it to it’s maximum performance capabilities independent of whatever else is connected to the card.

Ciao
Neil

I’ve spent the last few weeks wandering around my region promoting 6Gb RAID cards and their benefits.

While it’s not the world’s most exciting promotion (speed changes is about it) it does show that resellers are now really struggling to work out which disks to use for which environment. Yes 6Gb is good, but does it really give you much more than the 3Gb product did?

In a lot of cases the answer seems to be no. However when dealing with large numbers of disks, streaming data or pure SSD environments the answers is a resounding: yes!

So where is the problem? I still find many resellers out there who don’t understand the differences in drive types, and the ramifications of using different drive types for different types of data. Almost everyone agrees that 6Gb SSD is the ducks guts … fantastic performance for not a huge outlay, but are they willing to build servers out of them yet? Basically no.

One of the major reasons seems to be the rapid changes in SSD development are not being well communicated to the end user … all they hear is figures about read speeds and not much else. Is that sustained?, burst?, something else? (they have no idea).

Is that 6Gb SATA drive really better than a 3Gb version? Can either saturate the data pipe to the card? No, but it does appear that 6Gb drives tend to have more cache on them in an effort to make them appear faster.

While we are on that subject … I’m amazed how many people I’ve found in the last three weeks who will turn the write cache off on the controller (to “protect their data”) and not even take drive cache into consideration. Well guess what … there is a large amount of data sitting out there at the end of the wire in cache, not protected by card cache protection practices - just hoping the UPS keeps it going until everything is written to the disk. Now that’s a good subject for another post.

So in the end what my travels have shown me is that people seem even more confused regarding what drives they should use for what environment than they were previously. Choice is a good thing, but only when the consumer is clearly informed of what impacts their choices have on their data. At the moment even I’m struggling to keep up with the drive guys … and their very somewhat confusing information streams.

Ciao
Neil

Question to the Storage Advisors: (Barik) I am using 4 x Seagate Barracuda Green 1.5TB (new version, not the older LP) on a Adaptec 3405 and was wondering two things:
1. Using my system as a HTPC, for movies and music server, would it better as a raid 5 or raid 10 or something else?
2. These new drives are marketed as 4K drives as you know, so as far as Stripe size is concerned (as per your raid recommendation) do we need to do anything special for stripe size or any other command with these 4K drives?

Barik,

Question 1 is easy - since you are mainly reading from these drives, and you are looking for streaming speed, RAID 5 will be the best bet. RAID 10 is good for database but it will just chew up disk capacity and no do anything for your read speed.

Question 2 is interesting - as far as I know all 4K drives “translate” back to 512 bytes so as to emulate current model drives. That is important because our cards don’t talk natively to the drives in 4K. As for stripe size … this sounds dumb because its so non-technical, but use the default (256kb) - it works the best for 99.99% of applications on Adaptec cards.

Ciao
Neil

In spam that is.

Sorry about the lack of posts lately, and I think I’ve missed quite a few posts because I’m drowning in spam at the moment. The IT lads are in the the process of fixing it but my usual sledgehammer approach of just deleting everything without looking too closely has, I think, deleted far too many posts.

So if you posted something recently and I haven’t replied please send it again … I’ll look more closely next time.

Ciao
Neil

Question to the Storage Advisors: (Jake) I had commented a while back about using an Adaptec card for a home storage server…needless to say changing jobs (not by choice), and Wife going back to school has put that on the back burner. But I figured I would ask anyway because I like to “bench build” things 100 times before I even have the parts in my hands- and I might just learn something while I’m at it.

Question 2: I do a lot of work with NetApp filers – they exclusively use RAID DP on their storage – even when used in a virtual infrastructure. Granted I know that the filers essentially have a HUGE write cache behind them – that being said, in the above scenario, should I use RAID5\RAID6 or RAID10 for the disks that will house t

Jake,

Again I apologise but something cut off your question. However I get the gist of it.

If you have 8 drives in your server you could make any number of arrays. What I’d probably recommend is making a RAID 10 of 50gb or so (whatever you need for your OS) across all 8 drives. That will be very, very fast.

Then make a RAID ? over the rest of the available space on the disks. The ? type depends on data, which is related to your second question.

Question 2 is unanswerable without more information. 5, 6 or 10 depend on your data. Lots of small random reads and writes would dictate 10. Streaming data or good general mix would dictate 5. Paranoia or cautiousness based on general or streaming data would indicate 6.

It all depends on your data as which RAID type is best.

Ciao
Neil

Question to the Storage Advisors … (Alex) We recently bought a Chenbro case with 24 drive bays, there are 6 independent backplanes, 4 drives each. After a costly and dismal failure with “green” drives we bought some WD enterprise 2tb sata devices. To fuel this array we purchased two 51245’s, I know we could have gone with a single 52445 but I was trying to engineer the most disk IO I could and our motherboard has 7 8x pci slots (Asus p6t7 supercomputer motherboard).

The next day I did some tests stripi

Alex,

Unfortunately something went wrong with the blog and I did not get all the story, but I think I get the story (to to speak).

All of my questions would revolve around “what sort of data are you using here”. If this is sequential data then there is an issue. If this is random data then there is an issue of another kind. Random data does not sit well on parity arrays. The overhead of small writes to parity arrays (eg database) kills write performance.

Also … quick init/skip init should never be used unless talking to a RAID tech when you are sweating profusely and trying to get data back from a lost system. They put the array into “full stripe write” mode … on which write performance absolutely sucks.

So …

Please reply back to this with information on the kind of data you are running on this system and how you are testing this (ie what benchmark etc).

Ciao
Neil

In their boots that is. I’m talking about USB3. This new technology must have the tape drive vendors of the world a little concerned about the viability of people using tape drives. Of course libraries are still going to be viable due to their massive scalability, and some small buisness servers will still need multi-terabyte backups, but there are a lot of people out there who must be looking at the cost of replacing their tape drive and wondering about disk.

Disk is now up to 3tb, which is pretty large and relatively cheap. If you consider a small business running a backup every day of the week, one at the end of the month and the occasional offsite backup, that’s normally about 7 tapes plus your tape drive.

OR

You could use 7 single external USB drives.

I recently had an old friend call me up to discuss his tape backup. The unit had died (LTO2) and he needed to replace it and his tapes due to their age. The cost was pretty dramatic. So we looked at some alternatives. Their server is a small business unit with a full backup capacity of just under 300Gb. Some simple experimentation with USB2 external 2.5″ hard drives proved that (a) the backups were quicker (think the tape was getting very tired in it’s old age), that it was simple to manage (a DYMO label on each drive), and that the cost of implementing this backup scenario was radically cheaper than replacing a tape drive with 7 new cartridges and a cleaning tape.

My only real concern in this scenario was the speed of USB2. As it turned out, for the size of this server and the backup window the work practices of this organisation provided, USB2 speed was more than sufficient. However if this was a bigger server we’d be in trouble on time with USB2. Capacity could be handled by much larger USB drives, but USB2 would limit the speed of the backup - solved instantly by USB3.

Ironically the tape drive (now 4 years old) and SCSI card were my recommendation in the first place … because it was the technology of choice back then. However, the current crop of new technologies and their ridiculously low prices has forced me to change my tune.

I’d been hearing for a while from customers that the latest versions of SBS did not support tape natively, and they wanted to use eSATA. While this is a very good technology, it always seemed to cause problems getting cards working in servers or hot-swapping drives. I don’t expect USB3 to have these problems (USB2 has been pretty stable in this regard for quite some time).

So while the tape drive vendors might be a little concerned, the external hard drive vendors (like WD and Seagate) must be sitting back and waiting for server motherboards to take off with USB3 - it will most likely mean a lot of sales for their external drives into SBS servers.

Food for thought.

Ciao
Neil

I, like many of the people who work in this industry, am “the guy who knows about computers” to my friends and family. This means I get the job of cleaning viruses, reinstalling Windows, and much more sadly, trying to recover lost data - mainly family photos - cherished items gone into the ether with the crumbling surface of an old 200Gb SATA hard drive.

It’s not really the hardware vendor’s fault, and I’m not having a go at hard disks here, but people now put their lives (and their history, finances, memories and education) in the hands of mechanical devices that they purchased expecting to be like the fridge … reliable, sturdy and last a long, long time … even to the point where we, the consumer, get to make the decision regarding when we send it to meet it’s maker … not when some electronic component forces the decision upon us often with catastrophic consequences.

So all this pain (thankfully at the moment not mine) caused me to think about my own home system. Yes I back up my data (mostly sporting administration documents) but over in the corner is the “family” computer - which seems to have a life of it’s own because I can’t be bothered spending a great deal of time looking after it.

When I do get a pang of conscience, or the wife berates me because she can’t get the cd burner to work etc, then I always find myself surprised as to what I find on it (all good of course). Now that the kids have grown up they mostly just do facebook on the various netbooks lying around the house (for which they were purchased cheaply in China) - no data stored, but virtual communication somewhere up in the cloud - about which I don’t need to worry.

But on the home machine, thankfully in the well ordered file structure I imposed on the children and wife from a very young age, are thousands (yes literally thousands) of photos and videos - mostly of sporting moments good and bad showing that my wife has spent countless hours beside a BMX track videoing the kids while I’ve toiled away at sports administration and watched them … recording their special moments in my grey matter, not on video tape, then memory stick and finally on flash memory in the many different kinds of cameras (still and video) that have cluttered my office over the years.

Hmmm … better back this lot up. A simple arrangement of a batch file and a NAS box handles that behind the scenes, with a quick check occasionally to make sure my precious DOS skills have not failed with the ever changing command line structure of various versions of Windows.

But wait, it’s all in the same room. In fact it’s all in the same house … with all the natural disasters I see implanting themselves on the Australian landscape I’m feeling that this solution is not quite good enough. I could of course put it all on a USB drive and drop it in at mums (being 30 or so kilometres away), but that then becomes difficult to manage - I’ll have to go and get it and add the next instalment of photos and videos - not that I mind going to see mum … it’s just another job to do (the photo management that is).

So what else can I do? Why not the cloud? I hear nothing but the dreaded “cloud” these days that I may as well jump on the bandwagon. So a small investment and I’ve purchased myself a piece of virtual real estate in a land far-far away (for all I know) … I feel very proud of my smart 21st century solution to my dilemma.

But now the fun begins. Most of the videos are over 3gb in size (my wife knows how to take videos but not how to adjust a camera resolution etc). Hmmm, can’t upload more than a 1gb file. OK, that’s fixable - WinRAR to the rescue by compressing folders into CDROM sized segments of 700mb each. OK, I now only have about 130 of these to upload to the ether to easy my concerns about any potential data loss (and the consequent divorce). Easy, let’s just sit down one night and select a certain number of files and push them up to the cloud via the nice little interface that my provider gives me.

As you can imagine, the job is not finished yet. In fact it’s turning into a whole new dimension of problems. Had to increase the upload/download limit and speed on the internet connection so this would finish before next year’s lot had to go up, then had to sit and manage pushing large files up to the cloud over an excruciatingly slow connection. Here in Australia we use ADSL - fast to bring stuff down to me, but hopeless when it comes to pushing stuff up to the cloud.

So the whole grand idea has fallen into a long, time-consuming, miserable task that never seems to end.

There has to be a better way.

Ciao
Neil

I, like many of the people who work in this industry, am “the guy who knows about computers” to my friends and family. This means I get the job of cleaning viruses, reinstalling Windows, and much more sadly, trying to recover lost data - mainly family photos - cherished items gone into the ether with the crumbling surface of an old 200Gb SATA hard drive.

It’s not really the hardware vendor’s fault, and I’m not having a go at hard disks here, but people now put their lives (and their history, finances, memories and education) in the hands of mechanical devices that they purchased expecting to be like the fridge … reliable, sturdy and last a long, long time … even to the point where we, the consumer, get to make the decision regarding when we send it to meet it’s maker … not when some electronic component forces the decision upon us often with catastrophic consequences.

So all this pain (thankfully at the moment not mine) caused me to think about my own home system. Yes I back up my data (mostly sporting administration documents) but over in the corner is the “family” computer - which seems to have a life of it’s own because I can’t be bothered spending a great deal of time looking after it.

When I do get a pang of conscience, or the wife berates me because she can’t get the cd burner to work etc, then I always find myself surprised as to what I find on it (all good of course). Now that the kids have grown up they mostly just do facebook on the various netbooks lying around the house (for which they were purchased cheaply in China) - no data stored, but virtual communication somewhere up in the cloud - about which I don’t need to worry.

But on the home machine, thankfully in the well ordered file structure I imposed on the children and wife from a very young age, are thousands (yes literally thousands) of photos and videos - mostly of sporting moments good and bad showing that my wife has spent countless hours beside a BMX track videoing the kids while I’ve toiled away at sports administration and watched them … recording their special moments in my grey matter, not on video tape, then memory stick and finally on flash memory in the many different kinds of cameras (still and video) that have cluttered my office over the years.

Hmmm … better back this lot up. A simple arrangement of a batch file and a NAS box handles that behind the scenes, with a quick check occasionally to make sure my precious DOS skills have not failed with the ever changing command line structure of various versions of Windows.

But wait, it’s all in the same room. In fact it’s all in the same house … with all the natural disasters I see implanting themselves on the Australian landscape I’m feeling that this solution is not quite good enough. I could of course put it all on a USB drive and drop it in at mums (being 30 or so kilometres away), but that then becomes difficult to manage - I’ll have to go and get it and add the next instalment of photos and videos - not that I mind going to see mum … it’s just another job to do (the photo management that is).

So what else can I do? Why not the cloud? I hear nothing but the dreaded “cloud” these days that I may as well jump on the bandwagon. So a small investment and I’ve purchased myself a piece of virtual real estate in a land far-far away (for all I know) … I feel very proud of my smart 21st century solution to my dilemma.

But now the fun begins. Most of the videos are over 3gb in size (my wife knows how to take videos but not how to adjust a camera resolution etc). Hmmm, can’t upload more than a 1gb file. OK, that’s fixable - WinRAR to the rescue by compressing folders into CDROM sized segments of 700mb each. OK, I now only have about 130 of these to upload to the ether to easy my concerns about any potential data loss (and the consequent divorce). Easy, let’s just sit down one night and select a certain number of files and push them up to the cloud via the nice little interface that my provider gives me.

As you can imagine, the job is not finished yet. In fact it’s turning into a whole new dimension of problems. Had to increase the upload/download limit and speed on the internet connection so this would finish before next year’s lot had to go up, then had to sit and manage pushing large files up to the cloud over an excruciatingly slow connection. Here in Australia we use ADSL - fast to bring stuff down to me, but hopeless when it comes to pushing stuff up to the cloud.

So the whole grand idea has fallen into a long, time-consuming, miserable task that never seems to end.

There has to be a better way.

Ciao
Neil

I, like many of the people who work in this industry, am “the guy who knows about computers” to my friends and family. This means I get the job of cleaning viruses, reinstalling Windows, and much more sadly, trying to recover lost data - mainly family photos - cherished items gone into the ether with the crumbling surface of an old 200Gb SATA hard drive.

It’s not really the hardware vendor’s fault, and I’m not having a go at hard disks here, but people now put their lives (and their history, finances, memories and education) in the hands of mechanical devices that they purchased expecting to be like the fridge … reliable, sturdy and last a long, long time … even to the point where we, the consumer, get to make the decision regarding when we send it to meet it’s maker … not when some electronic component forces the decision upon us often with catastrophic consequences.

So all this pain (thankfully at the moment not mine) caused me to think about my own home system. Yes I back up my data (mostly sporting administration documents) but over in the corner is the “family” computer - which seems to have a life of it’s own because I can’t be bothered spending a great deal of time looking after it.

When I do get a pang of conscience, or the wife berates me because she can’t get the cd burner to work etc, then I always find myself surprised as to what I find on it (all good of course). Now that the kids have grown up they mostly just do facebook on the various netbooks lying around the house (for which they were purchased cheaply in China) - no data stored, but virtual communication somewhere up in the cloud - about which I don’t need to worry.

But on the home machine, thankfully in the well ordered file structure I imposed on the children and wife from a very young age, are thousands (yes literally thousands) of photos and videos - mostly of sporting moments good and bad showing that my wife has spent countless hours beside a BMX track videoing the kids while I’ve toiled away at sports administration and watched them … recording their special moments in my grey matter, not on video tape, then memory stick and finally on flash memory in the many different kinds of cameras (still and video) that have cluttered my office over the years.

Hmmm … better back this lot up. A simple arrangement of a batch file and a NAS box handles that behind the scenes, with a quick check occasionally to make sure my precious DOS skills have not failed with the ever changing command line structure of various versions of Windows.

But wait, it’s all in the same room. In fact it’s all in the same house … with all the natural disasters I see implanting themselves on the Australian landscape I’m feeling that this solution is not quite good enough. I could of course put it all on a USB drive and drop it in at mums (being 30 or so kilometres away), but that then becomes difficult to manage - I’ll have to go and get it and add the next instalment of photos and videos - not that I mind going to see mum … it’s just another job to do (the photo management that is).

So what else can I do? Why not the cloud? I hear nothing but the dreaded “cloud” these days that I may as well jump on the bandwagon. So a small investment and I’ve purchased myself a piece of virtual real estate in a land far-far away (for all I know) … I feel very proud of my smart 21st century solution to my dilemma.

But now the fun begins. Most of the videos are over 3gb in size (my wife knows how to take videos but not how to adjust a camera resolution etc). Hmmm, can’t upload more than a 1gb file. OK, that’s fixable - WinRAR to the rescue by compressing folders into CDROM sized segments of 700mb each. OK, I now only have about 130 of these to upload to the ether to easy my concerns about any potential data loss (and the consequent divorce). Easy, let’s just sit down one night and select a certain number of files and push them up to the cloud via the nice little interface that my provider gives me.

As you can imagine, the job is not finished yet. In fact it’s turning into a whole new dimension of problems. Had to increase the upload/download limit and speed on the internet connection so this would finish before next year’s lot had to go up, then had to sit and manage pushing large files up to the cloud over an excruciatingly slow connection. Here in Australia we use ADSL - fast to bring stuff down to me, but hopeless when it comes to pushing stuff up to the cloud.

So the whole grand idea has fallen into a long, time-consuming, miserable task that never seems to end.

There has to be a better way.

Ciao
Neil

This one is nothing to do with Adaptec, but I’d like to share with you what I spend a lot of my “spare” time doing (culminating in November each year) …

I play a small part in the organising of “The Snowy Ride”. This is an event we run each year (this year being the 10th Anniversary). The ride is a fund-raising event raising money for Children’s Cancer Research in Australia. The main beneficiary of this money is the Children’s Cancer Institute of Australia (CCIA). We split the money between cancer research and the caring of children in the wards at the Royal Children’s Hospital (Randwick).

While starting small, this event has grown to a massive 3200+ riders attending a weekend of fantastic riding (in the Snowy Mountains in southern NSW), entertainment and fundraising events of many different kinds. It took us 4 years to get to $750,000, while this year we have already raised that amount and are heading for the $1 million mark before year’s end.

So while I’m sitting here suffering arm pump from riding a total of 1500km in two separate days, typing solidly for two days and doing a whole stack of other menial administrative tasks, I’m one of the lucky ones. I have three kids, all healthy and happy, while others not so fortunate have the incredibly hard lot of having a child suffer from cancer. These children and parents are an inspiration to all of us, and are the reason we keep doing this work.

I’m very proud to say that the original 12 or so people who started this work 10 years ago are all still involved, with many of us having our children now step up and get involved in this massive operation. There are well over 70 volunteers who work on this event, with a small band working all year round to make sure this event keeps growing and keeps raising money for this worthwhile cause.

So if you ride a bike, come on down to Oz next November and join the fun. Even if you don’t ride a bike you can get involved in some small way by making a donation (there’s bound to be something on the websites for that). Hopefully if the boss reads this he will start to understand why this is the one time of the year that I absolutely, positively and definitley won’t be travelling for Adaptec … this is far too important an event for me to miss.

No, I don’t ride a Honda - I ride a Ducati, but I’m very proud to promote this event and Honda’s involvement. This company is a excellent example of a company that has a fantastic corporate conscience/heart, and have supported us from the very beginning. Honda proudly announced a $100,000 sponsorship for the next 5 years ($500K in total), which along with Snowy Hydro (the electrical generators in the Mountains) sponsorship of $100,000 for the next three years ($300K in total) ensures that we are well on our way to financing the research whose aim is to eliminate childhood cancer in the coming years.

Just so you can understand the structure … we started the Snowy Ride, then created the Steven Walter Foundation to manage both the ride and other fundraising activities we do throughout the year. Steven Walter was a young man who rode dirt bikes with us years ago, and whose dying wish (yes, Steve succumbed to cancer at 19 years of age) was that we do something to raise money for research so that no other person would have to suffer the terrible ordeal he endured before he died. That’s a hard request to ignore (and thankfully we haven’t).

If you’d like to find out more about the work that this organisation does please look at the following links …

http://snowyride.org.au/
http://www.stevenwalterfoundation.org.au/

Ciao
Neil

I’ve just spent a few hours sitting through vForum2010 in downtown Sydney (right next to the beautiful harbour). Now these guys know their stuff, and are developing their products and product lines at an amazing rate of pace. From what I can see they must have an amazing number of developers bringing this stuff to market.

OK, thats enough niceties about VMWare (they didn’t give me any free stuff so my gratitude only stretches so far). I was interested in two main areas - storage (surprise suprise) and virtual desktops.

On the virtual desktop side they have made some amazing breakthroughs with the size of the data pools required to host a large number of desktops on a server. On the storage side, while I have no doubt they know exactly what they are doing, vmWare are totally focussed on SANs (especially fibre ones). This is in no doubt required to support some of their crazier technologies such as vMotion, and at the enterprise level is probably the dominant storage subsystem.

However … I know from the day-to-day grind of life that there are plenty of people using DAS (Direct Attached Storage) with VMWare. While you can’t do vMotion it is a great way of consolidating machines into lesser, cheaper, quieter, less power-hungry racks or individual boxes.

So why am I talking about all this? It’s been my experience that this is an area where the commonly-configured standard stand-alone server suffers when it comes to storage. Capacity is pretty easy to achieve if using SATA drives, but performance becomes complicated and generally under-done.

So how to fix this? You could go out and buy a fibre san (or even an iSCSI one for that matter) if you have enough money. You then probably need to go and get some skills, or employ a bod who knows about fibre channel zoning, masking and pathing. You would also find (and I’m talking to the SMB VAR here) that you price yourself out of your client’s price range.

So what to do. You want to use VMWare for the consolidation benefits, and you want to use the hardware that you are familiar with, that fits your customer price brackets and you know you can support. What you don’t want, however, is to sell your customer a pup that doesn’t perform.

So what are your options. You could use all SAS drives. You’ll need plenty of them with possibly an external JBOD to fit them all in. They cost quite a bit of money so you’re getting to the top end of your customer budget before you’ve even considered adding your services and support costs (which is where you make your real money).

Hmmm … those SATA drives are looking pretty good … big, cheap … don’t need a massive physical server to fit them all in … hmmm - I like them. However they scare the bejeezes out of me when it comes to performance. I’ll certainly be putting enough processor and RAM into the system to ensure that they can handle the workloads I’m going to put on the machine, but what do I do with the storage.

Pretty simply … cache it. By adding solid state caching to SATA drives you get excellent performance at a fraction of the cost of using all SAS drives. You can probably even afford to build in hot and cold spares while you are at it to make yourself and your customer feel good.

It’s worth considering …

Ciao
Neil

We’ve changed the name to protect the innocent …

What was once MaxIQ is now “maxCache” … the technology is the same, the great performance boost is the same but the name is now different. Why … don’t ask me … obviously marketing were bored

The painful part with this will be changing all my powerpoint presentations!

Ciao
Neil

This is not new news to those of you who keep up with technology, but Seagate’s Momentus XT drive is out and about aimed at laptops and desktops (mostly laptops from what I can determine).

This unusual drive utilises a combination of nand flash and spinning platter, with a learning algorithm that copies frequently used files on to the flash component of the drive. This provides a great improvement in startup times and application opening speeds. According to a mate of mine who has one in his laptop it “absolutely rocks”.

The learing algorithm process seems to me to be similar in nature to the SSD caching technology we are implementing in our RAID cards. It can’t replace the learning process at the RAID card level for servers … because the caching needs to be done at the logical device level, not the hard drive … but Seagate does a good job of reproducing this process at the single drive level for single drive systems.

To me this seems like a great idea. I recently tried to fit all my files on my laptop into a 64Gb enterprise SSD. The performance was outstanding but I just could not get a comfortable fit (and all my files on the machine). I realised that I really can’t live without the 200Gb or so of data that I cart around with me.

So the Momentus, with its large capacity and good speed seems like the perfect drive for me. I get to cart around all the baggage I just can’t leave behind, and put some performance back into the old x61.

Now all I need to do is get Seagate to give me one for a “long term” test

Ciao
Neil

I’m not having a dig at any particular person, customer or group of people (all-round exclaimer), but … how much don’t we know about the day to day things we do?

I’m not talking about the one-offs such as me pulling the microwave oven apart last night because the wife thought the lcd screen was dirty … then spending the rest of the night working out how people with very small fingers put the thing together in the first place … no, I’m talking about the day to day tasks we do in our small world as computer administrators etc.

RAID seems to scare the pants off a lot of poeple. It doesn’t phase those of us who work in the field on a day to day basis, but it certainly seems to make a lot of peole I talk to very nervous indeed.

So why are they nervous? Basically (imho) it’s because the don’t know a great deal about the products they are using. Now that doesn’t mean I think everyone should be a rocket scientist or expert in the field of RAID cards, but it worries me that so many people are selling, installing, configuring and specifying RAID as a technology to their customers without having much knowledge at all about what it is they are doing.

Now that I’ve alienated half my audience (who in fact “think” they know what they are doing) … to those of you who are still reading …

Wait … a change halfway:

It’s all well and good for me to be sprouting the fact that people need to know more about the products and technologies they specify and sell, but how do they learn?

Obviously the web is number one. When I want to work out how to disassemble the desmodromic valve gear in my Duck I go to the web and read, read, read. When I want to find out which is the correct ADSL modem/router/firewall/VPN I go to the web … then I send an email to various vendors asking which of their products they recommend to fulfil my specific requirements.

By reading and asking I learn. Along the way I find out new little snippets of information that help me (a) sound like I know what I’m talking about and (b) advance the configuration, installation and utilisation of the product/technology/service I’m trying to implement.

So … (and yes, there’s always a “So …” at the end) …

Where do you go for information?
What websites do you use to learn about RAID?
Which organisation do you call or email to ask questions?
Who do you ask?

I’m asking this because I’d like to look at that information and not criticise it, but in fact promote those sources, be they blogs, reference sites or just whitepaper type articles. We have a bunch of links down the right hand side of our blog that are somewhat irrelevant, out of date and just plain broken … something I want to fix. So instead of deleting them, why not replace them with sources you find relevant and useful?

Send me your sources … I’m sure I can learn something along the way.

Ciao
Neil

I’m currently in the land of the long white cloud (NZ) talking SSD caching technology to our distributors and partners over here. While going through this process an interesting point has time to light.

In the US and Europe it seems to be the large players (datacentres) who are interested in this technology … mainly aimed at reducing their footprint and doing more with less servers.

In my part of the world performance of a system is much more an issue than the actual number of servers needed to fulfill a customer requirement. Of course VMware is everywhere down here and customers are already using a lot less physical servers than in years gone by, but while VMware has produce some good outcomes for customers in consolidating their servers, it has added a problem … how to make the storage keep up with the processor and memory footprints of modern servers.

Here in lies the moral to the story. In my part of the world it’s the small, customer-focussed VAR/SI who is grabbing hold of this technology, not the big boys in town. The small player tends to be more focussed on solving a particular customer need rather than just putting together another model of server to add to their range. Very often servers are built to solve a particular customer need rather than just trying to make do with a standard model to fit a customer requirement.

This is where SSD caching is taking a strong foothold. While my US counterparts are having great success in their large datacentre customers (lucky sods) … I don’t have those sort of customers in such numbers down here. The small player is the one who is taking this technology and running with it.

So while it seems ironic that our marketing department and US sales team seem focussed on the big end of town, it’s the smaller, more agile VAR/SI who is making the most of this exciting technology to both fulfill customer needs and gain footholds on new customer spaces that they did not play in before.

It will be interesting to watch the development of this market as more and more people become aware of the advantages of SSD caching and look for innovative ways of making use of this technology.

Ciao
Neil

No, I don’t even look like Ben Stiller. However I just got back from China where we met the PMC crowd (the “Fockers” in this heading). Nice bunch of tech-heads with some crazy technologies up their sleeves.

As you may be aware, PMC have purchased the “technology” part of Adaptec (not really sure what other parts there were) so we are now “Adaptec by PMC” rather than just plain old “Adaptec”. While it has a nice tone to it I’m having major problems remembering my new email address (had the old one for so long I’d grown attached to it).

Anyway … the real question I keep getting asked by people is … “What does this mean for the future of Adaptec?”

It would be rude of me to say “nothing” because there are major changes and advances afoot (all positive), but the reality for the end user, apart from possibly have to change my email address in Outlook, is that it’s business as usual for just about everyone.

Yes, we lost a few people in the change, and that’s always sad, but time marches on and we just have to get on with it (which is my way of saying I still have a job so I’m not too concerned) … I’ve been quiet on the blog front for a while (keeping my head down to see how the new bosses took to me) but it’s back to business for the typing department now so keep the questions rolling in and I’ll eventually answer them (eventually … I’m not exactly punctual on this thing).

Ciao
Neil