seashell software

Why I'm Not Too Worried About My Teaching Workload...

2009-05-18T14:31:32Z

...in spite of the recession. A new EMC-sponsored study projects some incredible numbers in terms of storage growth in the next 18 months:

The new findings highlight the third update to the groundbreaking Digital Universe study, which measures and forecasts the vast amounts and diverse types of digital information created and copied annually. Calculated to be 487 billion gigabytes² in size, the amount of information created in 2008 is the equivalent of more than:

* 237 billion fully-loaded Amazon Kindle wireless reading devices
* 4.8 quadrillion online bank transactions
* 3 quadrillion Twitter feeds
* 162 trillion digital photos
* 30 billion fully-loaded Apple iPod Touches
* 19 billion fully-loaded Blu-ray DVDs

This backs up something I mention lately in my storage classes. At the very least, all the user account data and such that already exists for banks has to be kept for FDIC-insured deposits, no matter what the name of the company where they land is. Look at the numbers on new data alone!

Storage teams won't lose their jobs, but wthe bigger concern is managing all that growth, and scaling up to meet it. If Tucci's numbers here are solid, that merely reinforces the problem he has in EMC's inability to link Symmetrix and Clariion, like external solutions from HDS and IBM.

Flashback To My Childhood

2009-05-14T21:30:22Z

Something you often see in offices of computer companies is a "museum exhibit." The first one I remember was at the old ComputerLand store in Metairie, LA. When one of the very first IBM PCs they leased came back five years later, they put it out in the reception area, listing what $10,000 bought you at that time. I've always said I'll put out my TRS-80 Model I if I ever have a public office.

At COMMAX in Oslo, Norway, the "museum exhibit" is a teletype, very similar to the model I used as a high school kid learning what computers were all about.

Back in January of 1972, Bro. Neal Golden, SC, invited a bunch of 8th graders at Brother Martin High School to join the Academic Games team and play the game Equations. I was one of the group, and we used a small seminar-style conference room in the school's upstairs Resource Center as our practice location. In the corner of that room stood a teletype that was used by the Computer Science students to do their class assignments. Since we 8th graders had a natural curiosity about computers, and since Brother Neal was writing a book on the BASIC programming language, he allowed us to learn some programming as well. The Academic Games kids were his beta-test group for the lab exercises in the book.

The teletype was connected to the outside world via an acoustic coupler modem. These were the days of rotary-dial phones, so you would dial a number, then when you heard the carrier tone from the other side, you put the phone's handset into the acoustic coupler, and the two systems would "talk" over the phone line. Initially, the teletype was connected to a DECSystem 10 owned by a private company, but Brother Neal later worked out a deal with Technical Associates of New Orleans (TANO) to use their DEC PDP-11 midrange system. We paid a flat fee, dialed a local phone number, and could do just about anything we wanted on that system. Since it was time-consuming to type in an entire program in real time, we would set the teletype in "off-line" mode and type out our programs, saving them on pink punch-tape. The photo above is of the teletype's punch-tape reader. Once you finished creating the tape of your program, you then dialed up the computer and fed the paper tape into the reader, uploading your work. You could then make any last-minute changes to the program, run it, gather the printed output, and give it to Brother Neal for his review.

When we had access to the local computer, we were able to do more real-time work. That's where I learned to appreciate Digital hardware and their operating systems.

Anyway, blessings to Brother Neal for starting me down this path, and thanks to COMMAX for triggering such great memories.

HH0-120 Exam - HDS Modular Storage Foundations

2009-04-08T20:09:13Z

Just finished the test. I got an 86%, 52 out of 60

This is a totally new revision of the test. With the exception of the Hi-Track question (which has been on the test since the beginning), I did not see one question from last year or the braindump/sample questions I've used in class.

This is the breakdown for my set of questions:

1. Storage strategy (7)
2. Enterprise Storage Hardware (15)
3. Business Continuity Software (15)
4. Storage Management software (12)
5. Storage Virtualization (5)
6. Archiving, Backup and restore (3)
7. NAS (1),
8. Performance (1)
9 Maintenance (1)

Scatter-braindump follows: Will revise/polish this tonight.

what view do you need to be in TnM to do forecasting?
valid dual-use configurations on AMS1000
HDPS feature-bare metal restore
ProtecTier - HyperFactor
Valid Storage for HCAP 500
NAS - NFS & CIFS
Performance Monitor
classic Hi-Track question
ORM?
Shadowimage-what copies if there is no data on P-VOL?

HDS HH0-120 Exam

2009-03-30T20:23:53Z

This is the current section breakdown for the HDS Modular Storage Foundations Exam (HH0-120), along with a mini-braindump:

1. Storage strategy (4)
2. Enterprise Storage Hardware (14)
3. Business Continuity Software (15) 1 Question on Business continuity manager
4. Storage Management software (12), included 2 question on Hitachi Storage Capacity Reporter
5. Storage Virtualization (7)
6. Archiving, Backup and restore (3) 2 questions on Hitachi Data Protection Suite,
7. NAS (2), BlueArc
8. Performance (2), Performance Monitor question on what metric does it collect.
9 Maintenance (1), Hi-track on call home feature and remote maintenance

Hitachi HH0-110 Certification Exam

2009-03-23T20:39:31Z

The exam was revised around January, and I've gotten some feedback from THI0517 students since then. Here's a current breakdown of the sections:

Storage strategy 4

Enterprise Storage Hardware 14

Business Continuity software 15

Storage Management software 12

Storage Virtualization 7

Archiving, backup and restore 3

NAS 2

Performance 2

Maintenance 1

That totals to 60 questions, up from 58 last year. The proportions here are still the same as before, with hardware and replication still at about half the test.

Personal Continuity - Social Media (1)

2009-03-21T22:49:38Z

(continuing our occasional series on Personal Continuity- applying Business Continuity concepts to the individual)

One of the biggest problems individual users of the Internet have is keeping up with people when we change our primary method of keeping in touch with on-line friends.

If you've been on-line more than three years, think back to what you were doing then to keep in touch with friends. AIM? Yahoo! Messenger? MSN? How about before that, ICQ? Chat rooms on AOL? Go back even two years ago, when everyone was either building their MySpace page or running away from it. Invariably, MySpace got bought out and became overrun with spammers and pre-teens, not necessarily in that order.

Now, we've got Twitter. It's the method-of-the-moment, but where will we be with it in two or three years? What happens to all the folks you know who are on Twitter or Facebook when the next neat concept appears?

That's where Personal Continuity comes in, and it's really simple--keep up your address book! Ever since e-mail spam became the biggest problem on the Internet, we take extraordinary measures to limit access to our e-mail accounts. It's not that hard to do, since sites like FaceBook allow us to comment on others' pages and the FB site itself sees to it that they are notified of the comment. Same with Twitter, your "direct messages" on that site go off to the other party's mobile phone (via SMS), and you don't even need to know their number.

You don't need to know, that is, until the oooh-shiny bug bites you.

As much as it scares the heck out of the @chrisbrogan types of the world that people will abandon Twitter after all the effort they've put into building up their followings, it's going to happen. When we all move to the Next Fun Thing, we'll get everyone to move with us by inviting them. The Next Fun Thing will likely give us a few ways to do that, including asking you for your e-mail address book. You can upload your Outlook or Thunderbird addresses, or allow a service to peek into your Gmail/Hotmail/Y! Mail account to grab your friends.

Assuming, of course, you actually have the e-mail addresses of your friends. There's no better time than now to get your contact list up-to-speed. If you keep in touch with folks via more than one social/business networking site, you may have to take a couple of different approaches.

Twitter: For Twitter, it's easy--ask your followers to e-mail you! If you don't want to put your "regular" email address into the Twitter public stream, use a Y! or Gmail account. Get them to direct-message you back, turn on e-mail notifications, and it should be easy to add them to your address book.

FaceBook: Same basic idea as Twitter, just ask them. Send personal messages if you don't want to put your e-mail out in public. If that doesn't bother you, do your message both as a "note" and as a "status update," since those are the most-read sections of the site.

LinkedIn: You can download a vCard for each of your LI "connections" that you should be able to import into your e-mail address book. Sure, you could use the same tactic you'll use for Twitter, but going to each contact's page isn't a bad idea. Putting someone front-and-center in your focus might inspire you to contact them for other reasons as well, and that might lead to interesting things.

Contacting folks from other on-line services is basically a variation on one of these themes. Call up a typical profile page of one of your friends from whatever service and see what info you can pull from that location. Once you have it all together, be sure to back up your contacts onto a flash drive/card, as well as export it from your primary e-mail address book to your secondary. Don't have a secondary e-mail? Get one. It's important!

Blogging About Training

2009-03-16T16:42:41Z

I'm taking this site in a bit of a different direction. Starting this morning, I'll be blogging about computer training, discussing both general training topics and specifics to Hitachi Data Systems' courses.

I've always been hesitant to discuss the training I do in a blog format, mainly because a lot of the course material is "company confidential," and I don't want to have to sort out which topics fall in that category. Still, there are a number of things I can write about, so here it goes.

The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club!

--Tyler Durden, Fight Club, 1999

I've modified these rules to be firm policies for my teaching career. Put simply, you do not talk about students. This is because I don't believe in burning bridges. Given how long I've been teaching, however, it's now possible for me to introduce a level of anonymity into the process. Rest assured that any references to students I make here will be to incidents that happened over two years ago.

And here it goes! My class this week is THI0515, Storage Foundations (Modular) for HDS. Next entry will discuss some of the techniques involved in teaching an all-lecture class.

HDS Tiered Storage Manager

2009-02-04T06:43:50Z

Flash Demo http://edemo.hds.com/edemo/vault1/HTSSolution.swf

HDS 2000-series AMS Storage Arrays (3)

2009-01-17T15:03:48Z

Day 3 of the TCI1535 class. Day 1 summary here, Day 2 is here.

All of the day spent working with SNM2, GUI and CLI. Extensive lab work, good stuff!

SNM2 is client-server. Specs included for server, Windows-only, no Solaris option. 2GHz CPU/2GB RAM recommended. Client reuires JRE 1.6.0 or higher. "password protection" from thunder/ams is being superseded by server-based "account authentication" move is more towards HDvM-style system. Installer needs to know IP address of management PC (SNM2 server) during wizard.

GUI is a LOT like HDvM! Also has extensive on-line help.

Initial setup procedures are a wizard. Alerts, ports, spares, WWNs, you get the idea.

License keys must be installed as usual.

Basic install lab activity--scheduled 60minutes, took about 90 for the three groups to complete. Lots of questions, no real problems. Looks like SNM2 works as described.

LU Wizard is MUCH improved over SNM! Does the same tasks as SNM but interface is much cleaner.

Host Groups now allow for heterogeneous Multi-Host Connections. LUN Manager section of SNM2 manages access.

LUSE is changing. Existing material (and SNM2) still describes, but concept is changing, as is name of feature.

Software Features - use "Advanced Settings" section of SNM2 to get to these. Must do custom config of Java 1.6.x to make work. Procedure is well-explained. SNM2 kicks you out of Advanced Settings after 30min of inactivity.

Cache Partition Manager - no changes from earlier AMS.

Copy-On-Write snapshot requires a re-boot of array--2000s support up to 32 snapshots, array must re-configure cache and carve out a lot of control memory for VVOL devices. Richard really rips on snapshots on modular. I'll be revising my notes on AMS2500-vs-USPVM based on his opinions on extent COW is a cash hog.

What I Teach - Hitachi Data Systems

2009-01-13T19:01:37Z

I wrote an article for this blog back in 2006 explaining the sort of thing I teach for EMC, specifically Business Continuity on large-scale storage systems. Since I'm teaching a lot for Hitachi Data Systems now, I thought it would be a good idea to elaborate a bit on their classes.

First, some background. In 2000-2001, I was doing a lot of teaching for a company in the Boston area that was a training partner for Compaq. They were partners with Digital Equipment Corporation prior to Compaq's acquisiton of Digital, and we continued to deliver classes on Tru64 UNIX, TruClusters, and StorageWorks disk systems. Boston is one of those areas where compter professionals move around regularly, so one of our Digital/Compaq contacts landed at EMC. We were engaged to develop a course on how to hook up non-EMC storage to their then-relatively-new product, EMC Control Center. We went out and acquired some Compaq StorageWorks frames, a couple of NetApp filers, and a HDS Thunder frame.

It was then that I began digging into the sublime mysteries of HORCM. We designed a number of lab exercises involving in-system replication on the Thunder, and showed the EMC folks what could and could not be controlled through ECC. Overall, the class was fun to teach, in spite of some complications involving accessing the hardware for the labs (which was located in Southborough, MA). While ramping this course up, I also was auditing several other EMC classes, dealing with the Symmetrix product line. That's how I came to be up to speed on that product line so I can teach TimeFinder/SRDF
and ECC now.

Of course nothing stays the same in this business, and soon one of the EMC contacts we had landed at HDS, right at the time the company was expanding HDS Academy and implementing their new
certification program. I was contracted by a company to help with development of two "foundations" classes, one each for the HDS "enterprise" and "modular" lines. These classes are now THI0515, Storage Foundations (Modular), and THI0517, Storage Foundations (Enterprise). After the developer, I was the first instructor to deliver both of these classes. I've also been over to Holland to do a TTT (Train-The-Trainer) class for THI0517.

Unfortunately, the company I was working for HDS through fell out of favor with the Academy for reasons I'm not quite sure about. (I stay out of the office politics as much as possible), so I spent most of 2006 and 2007 teaching for EMC. I made the decision to stay home for a while in the fall of 2007, to work on the streetcar nonprofit and be dad to my 8th grader who made marching band at his high school. When family was pretty much tired of me being home all the time, I e-mailed a couple of folks at HDS to see what was going on, and was immediately re-connected with the Academy.

In addition to the "foundations" classes, I teach several other subjects. The HDS equivalent to the replicaton class I used to teach for EMC is CSI0147, Enterprise Replication Fundamentals. This is a four-day class covering both in-system (ShadowImage, Copy-on-Write Snapshot) and remote (TrueCopy, Universal Replicator) replication concepts. This class is fun because it gives the students a lot of lab time. I also teach the modular (smaller-scale storage) replication class. I've recieved so many favorable evaluations and props for the foundations classes, however, that they keep me busy with those.

The storage arrays addressed in these classes hold a LOT of hard disk drives. The smallest array is the WMS-100, which is the size (more or less) of a half-height refrigerator. It has seven shelves that hold 15 hard drives each, for a total of 105 drives. The largest array is the USP-1100, which consists of five cabinets each the size of a refrigerator, filled with those 15-drive shelves. These storage systems are designed for companies with large data needs.

So, what do we teach in a "Storage Foundations" class? Well, the Enterprise class, which covers the Universal Storage Platform-V and Universal Storage Platform-VM storage arrays, is a four-day class that breaks down (more or less) like this:

Day One: Introductory stuff, Product Philosophy, Overview of the product line, a detailed hardware overview, and a module on the software that is used to manage the array.

Day Two: Modules covering software products used for data replication. We cover both "in-system" and
"remote" replication. In-system replication is when you copy data from one set of drives in a storage array to another set of drives in the same array. The backup set can sit there in case there is a problem
with the production data, or it can be mounted and used for another purpose. Remote replication is when data on a set of drives in one storage array is transmitted to a different storage frame in another
location. That way, if something happens to your main data center (power blackout, fire, other disaster), you can start up the copy in a different location.

Day Three: Overviews of many of the software products used on these arrays, such as how to implement the HDS Tiered Storage concept. We also cover the various management products which
can be purchased as add-ons to the basic frame, such as Hitachi Device Manager, Hitachi Global Link Availability Manager, and Hitachi Tuning Manager.

Day Four: Class wraps up with discussions of HCAP (Hitachi Content Archive Program), NAS (Network Attached Storage) options, as well as the data protection and virtual tape capabilities of the arrays.

Whew!

It's fun, I love it. The only thing that's more fun than these foundations classes are the more-advanced, single-product classes, because those involve helping the students work with lab exercises. Those classes are also easier on my voice, since they're half-lecture, half-lab work, and the Foundations classes are all-lecture.

So that's what I'm doing when I'm not home. If there's a downside to teaching at this level, it's that I don't get to teach folks who work in less-technical fields. This storage training is really only useful to IT
professionals, and a specific segment of those folks at that. Talking to folks about scanners this morning on Twitter reminded me that it's a lot of fun to teach less-technical stuff, such as ACT!, business card scanning, and e-mail. Still, those classes don't get me trips to Holland, Tokyo, and Singapore. :-)

HDS 2000-series AMS Storage Arrays (1)

2009-01-13T01:05:59Z

I'm sitting in this week on a class on the new modular storage arrays from Hitachi Data Systems. Since a bunch of folks asked me to update them on some of the details on the new products, the AMS 2000-series arrays, I decided to blog it. If anyone catches anything here that's NDA, please comment or let me know (edward at ebranley dot com) so I can edit this and keep this for public consumption.

The AMS 2100, 2300, and 2500 are new models that supersede the AMS 200, 500, and 1000. There are a number of changes and upgrades, most notably the use of Serial-Attached-SCSI (SAS) drives in the 2000s instead of the Fibre-Channel (FC) drives previously used.

The AMS 2100 supersedes the AMS 200. It's a half-cabinet array (8 shelves of 15 drives plus control unit). This is up from the 200, which was 7 shelves, giving the 2100 a total of 120 drives. Instead of the mixed back end (FC+SATA), the array has a 16-path (4x4) SAS Wide link. The SAS shelves support both the new SAS as well as existing SATA drives. It has 4 front-end ports, either FC or iSCSI. Max cache (mirrored) is 4GB

The AMS 2300 is a full-height cabinet, 16 shelves, 240 drives. It's got double the front-end ports of its predecessor, the AMS 500, with 8 FC ports (or 4 iSCSI). The 2300 also has a 4x4 SAS Wide back end. Max cache (mirrored) is 8GB.

The AMS 2500 is the two-cabinet model. It tops out at 33 shelves (base + 32), with 16 FC or 8 iSCSI ports on the front end. This is fully double the front end ports of the old array, the AMS 1000. The back end is 4x8, because it's spread over two cabinets. Max cache on the 2500 (mirrored) is 16GB.

The SATA drives for all three arrays are SATA2, which have MBTF close to that of the SAS drives.

The front-end of the 2000s is true active/active - no more "lun ownership" on these. LUNs can be assigned to host groups on either controller. This is a HUGE advancement over the 200/500/1000 arrays.

Cache numbers double with these arrays because they use either 2GB or 4GB DIMMs

The 2000-series are managed by a new application, Storage Navigator Modular 2 (SNM2). If you've worked with DAMP for the Thunders or SNM for the older AMS systems, you'll be able to find your way through SNM2. The new GUI is an HBASE application, so it's got a look-and-feel more like HDvM.

More coming tomorrow. This is a summary of day one lectures. The lab for today was "component identification."

this is like selling crack on the playground...

2007-08-30T21:13:27Z

The Louisiana Small Business Development Center is enabling Microsoft to further screw business owners in Louisiana more than nature, FEMA, and Aaron Broussard ever could:

NEW ORLEANS – Louisiana small businesses still struggling after the 2005 hurricanes will be eligible for one year of free Microsoft software licensing, Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-New Orleans, said.
Under the program, which starts in September, eligible businesses can purchase a three-year license for Microsoft software, such as Windows and Office. Businesses can bring the first year's invoice to any Louisiana Small Business Development Center. Microsoft will pay the amount.

Buy three, get a rebate on one year? Wow, some help.

Anybody considering this offer would be better off with Linux and OpenOffice.org.

Storm Warning!

2007-08-30T17:57:31Z

No, it's all blue skies here this afternoon, but many of your PCs have been hit by a Storm and you might not even know it.

"Storm" is a variant of a work program that infects a Windows-based PC, turning it inot a "zombie." These "zombie" computers become mail servers that can be controlled by the spammer responsible for infecting your computer. Not only can the spammer use your computer to send thousands of e-mail messages for their paying customers, they can also use your PC as part of a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. A DDoS attack is where thousands of zombie-PCs will attempt to access a website simultaneously, forcing the servers to shut down.

What's really nasty about the Storm worm is that its authors are good at social engineering. You've probably seen e-mails over the last few weeks saying "You've received an e-card from a friend" or some such. That's the hook to get you to browse to malware-infested websites and download programs that contain the worm.

This week, it's a different tactic. Instead of the e-card come-on, the Storm guys are sending out e-mails that look like a friend is pointing you to a YouTube video. Naturally you'll be curious, so you click, going to the same malware sites. They try to get you to download a "viewer" which is really the worm.

Don't get ensnared by this sort of social engineering!

Install Virus Protection
Don't click-through to unknown websites
Trust noone!
Use common sense...

Always keep in mind that these worms are put out in the world by professionals, not just kids looking to make a name for themselves in hackerdom. Zombie-bot networks of PCs make their owners millions. They fight dirty, attacking the "white hat" hackers that try to stop them. Use common sense and don't let your PC do their bidding!

iSCSI is coming...

2007-08-22T13:26:31Z

When I teach enterprise-level storage classes, there's usually a snicker at the mention of iSCSI (SCSI-3 over IP networking). The reasons for the snickers is, of course, all of the folks I teach use fibre-channel to transmit data over Storage Area Networking.

Not so fast, I'll say. Even though absolutely nobody I teach messes with iSCSI in a production environment, it's coming. And when Dell gets serious about something, expect a paradigm shift:

Dell will host a major storage product unveiling in September, and we've got our money on an iSCSI storage device the company has been hinting at for months as part of the show.

The Register has learned that Dell is set to unveil a new iSCSI system called MD3000i. The unit will reportedly run on the same physical platform as the MD3000, which is Dell's direct attached SAS device.

Keep in mind that Dell already OEMs the Clariion line from EMC as a fibre-channel solution, but even buying from Dell doesn't lower the overall investment costs of FC storage. Not only do you still have to contend with the costs of a fabric infrastructure, you have to find trained, skilled SAN admins.

And that's the biggie. My 13-year old knows enough about IP networking to hook to a shared printer in my home office and to use ftp. If he sticks with that, in five years, he'll be an 18-year old networking geek, the kind that ISPs hire cheap to do admin work in data centers. Catch is, there aren't a lot off 13-year olds who play with Brocade switches. There's all these experienced network admins whose skills can be upgraded to SAN, but not without cost. SNIA training classes run $3500-5000 per week, not counting expenses. Vendor-sponsored training is at the same level.

iSCSI shifts that dynamic radically. If the front end of the storage subsystem is ethernet rather than fibre channel, a small business' network guys are ready to go.

That means there are opportunities abound for workign with those companies. Their guys may be able to hook the storage to the network, but they still need to understand concepts such as provisioning and business continuity.