There’s been lots of talk about the wonders of VVols for a long time. They seemed to be a large amount of hope that they would be the panacea of all our Storage and Virtualization woes and be the vision going forward, at least for our VMware environments. The hype Continue Reading
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Dell EMC Unity AFA-OE version 4.5x Upgrade
Gone are the days of 6 hour, nerve racking updates for Storage Arrays. They used to be a logistical nightmare. Change Control, careful planning. What if it goes pear shaped ? These are things that used to keep us up at night. Driven by a requirement of quick and frequent updates, Continue Reading
CommVault – Upgrade DDB to Transactional Mode
The deduplication databases (DDB) are arguably the most important component in an efficient and fast CommVault environment. If you’ve ever had a Media Agent fail unexpectedly before the DDB’s were able to gracefully shutdown, you’d be well aware the the restore and rebuild times can be very long. In Version Continue Reading
EMC XtremIO PowerShell support – Finally!
EMC have released XIOS version 4.1.10-33 and XMS version 4.2 recently, and although they look like minor point releases, there are some long awaited improvements that I certainly have been pleased with. The first one is a PowerShell support. Readers of this blog will now I’m a big PowerShell guy. Continue Reading
CommVault – The need for speed, pt 1
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 Continue Reading
Synology DSM 5.2 – Replacing a failed disk in SSD Cache
Not long ago I installed some SSD cache in a Synology DS1815+. It was a cinch. To my surprise, less than 1 week into it’s life, one of the mirrored Samsung 850 Pro drives failed. Fortunately this unit was not in production, but it would not have mattered as the cache Continue Reading