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

EMC VNX – Self Help using “MyDocs”

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 Continue Reading

EMC RecoverPoint- Scripting bulk changes to Consistency Groups

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 Continue Reading

EMC- March Product Update roundup: VNX, VNX2, NaviSECCLI, RecoverPoint, USM

It’s been a busy month for software updates @ EMC. If you subscribe to the various product bulletins, you’d have seen this info, otherwise, READ on ! VNX1 https://support.emc.com/products/12781_VNX1-Series Updated Navisphere CLI (naviseccli), Unisphere Service Manager (USM), Unisphere Host Agent VNX2 https://support.emc.com/products/36656_VNX2-Series Updated Navisphere CLI (naviseccli), Unisphere Service Manager (USM), Unisphere Host Continue Reading

EMC – VNX/2 -Accurately show Storage Pool RAID Drive Counts with Naviseccli

A frequent topic on various EMC forums is how to layout Storage Pools according to EMC best practice, typically regarding about what Drive count to use in the RAID config. The best practice documents* is the source of truth for this when creating pools, but what about when you expand Continue Reading

EMC MCx FAST Cache : Where’d my Dirty Pages go?

The VNX2/MCx Array release by EMC in 2013 highlighted the whole “multi-core everything” (MCx) software upgrade to make best use of the available CPU cores in the Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 Processors. This allowed for greater parallelism of tasks and big performance improvements across Data services and functions. I’m not Continue Reading

EMC VNX/VNX2 – Naviseccli & Powershell – Bulk config changes with ease

GUI’s are generally cool, but when you need to get many of the same/similar tasks done, you can’t beat the speed and ease of using scripts and CLI based tools. I recently had a situation with a EMC VNX2 array where someone (or something) had caused all the LUNs in Continue Reading

“GHOST” Vulnerability on EMC products

No, not that type of ghost.   Just a quick post to collate some info regarding EMC equipment and a recently discovered vulnerability in certain libraries present in some versions of Linux, which are utilized in a number of EMC systems. As usual, this is a buffer-overflow type vulnerability, this time Continue Reading