Promise announced a new firmware, support for terabyte drive modules and a new sleeker chassis design at MacWorld. While the chassis design and the terabyte drive module support are self explanatory you might be asking what’s up with the ‘ole firmware upgrade. To upgrade the firmware start off by going to the Promise website for the firmware updater, read the agreement and click on I Agree to download the AppleMultifw_v10.05.2270.01.zip file. Extract the file and grab the AppleMultifw_v10.05.2270.01.img file. Now make sure that any media being stored on the SAN has been backed up to a secure location. Now for the easy part, log in to the web portal for…
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Xsanity Party at MacWorld
For those of you at MacWorld, the Xsanity party will be held Thursday night at 8pm at the Tunnel Top on Bush Street, fittingly after the party being hosted by Promise at the Marriot: http://www.xsanity.com/index.php?topic=site Hope to see you there!
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Nexsan's SATABeast
I first came across this thing a few MacWorld’s ago. It was impressive then in terms of how densely packed the chassis was with drives and that the form factor was something so similar to the Apple form factor I was worried about potential legal action. But no legal action came and they’re still doing their thing. The SATABeast, from Nexsan is as impressive in raw disk space girthyness as it is diminutive in comparable size. 42TB in a 4U chassis. That’s 10.5TB per unit of rackspace. The AutoMAID software allows you to cut down BTU and power requirements by spinning down drives that aren’t in use. This isn’t to…
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TimeMachine Over Xsan and iSCSI
Now that I’ve shown over the years how to setup an Xsan and iSCSI targets on Mac OS X I am starting to get a number of questions about how to set these up in such a way that Time Machine can backup to them. Since they’re not your typical disks in a lot of cases there’s a small command that you’ll need to run to make it work: defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1 Essentially, once you’ve run this command you’ll be able to back up to anything that appears in /Volumes and then some (for example share points on your local network might appear even if you haven’t yet…
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How to Use Xsan with iSCSI
Using iSCSI targets with Xsan… Don’t do this one at home kids. It’s just silly and not going to be supported by anyone… But if you are like me then you can do it if you must. So to get started with iSCSI check out this article. When you have a LUN that is connected don’t yet assign it a file system (or if you have partition it back to free space). Now install Xsan but don’t yet create a volume. Once you’re done, you can go ahead and fire up your trusty Terminal app from /Applications/Utilities. Type in cvlabel -l which should show you all your available LUNs. Next,…
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How to use iSCSI on Mac OS X
iSCSI is a network storage protocol that allows sending and receiving of SCSI commands over a TCP/IP network. This allows you to leverage Ethernet, a low cost network medium to get SAN performance and network based storage. While you can use pretty much any Ethernet switch, I’d recommend that if you’re going to use iSCSI that you dedicate a switch to it, or use quality switches and build a dedicated VLAN for your iSCSI traffic. Recently, I’ve recently been seeing a lot of traffic about whether or not you can use iSCSI with Mac OS X. The answer, yes. As with Xsan, to get started with iSCSI you’ll need an…
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Final Cut Server and Xsan Testers Needed
I’ve finally finished writing a pair of Dashboard Widgets that monitor Final Cut Server and Xsan processor and RAM intensity. A third on FileMaker Server should be complete within the next few days. If you’re interested in testing them let me know. Screens below:
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Xsan TCO
I recently read an article in CIO magazine about the cost per gig per month. In the article they quoted Google at about 6 cents per gig per month. I use Amazon for a few projects, which runs at about 12 cents per gig per month. Including labor and hardware I decided to look at about what it would cost per gigabyte per month for Xsan storage. Averaging out 30 installs that we did over the past year turned out a total of about 7.2 cents per gig per month, as opposed to around $2.00 per gig per month which is pretty average for many SAN solutions. Now, Xsan…
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Mac OS X: Enable and Disable Spotlight
To Disable Spotlight for Mac OS X you can stop the Spotlight processes from being invoked by launchd. To do so use the following commands: launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist To re-enable it you would simply load up your launchd processes again like so: launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.Spotlight.plist launchctl load -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.metadata.mds.plist
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Xsan: Setting up StorNext Clients on Red Hat Enterprise
Xsan and the acfs (Apple Clustered File System) volumes that Xsan controls can be utilized by Windows and Linux clients. The Windows setup is fairly straight forward, so here we’re going to cover setting up a Linux client to mount an Xsan volume using StorNext. First, buy StorNext. Second, register StorNext. Then, go to your Metadata Controller and Backup Metadata Controller and use the cvfsid command. Copy the contents and go to this site, completing the form using the output from cvfsid: http://Prodreg.quantum.treehousei.com/login.aspx Now put the information that Quantum sends you into the /Library/FileSystems/Xsan/config/license.dat file on your Metadata Controllers and reboot them. Now you’re ready to setup your clients.…