The Promise X30 and beyond have been out for some time. I find that as the older X10 units reach the next phase of their lifecycle, removing LUNs and RAIDs from the units is a necessity. While many are put back into production as near-line or backup storage (with new drives even) these RAIDs still need to be cleaned off. As such, an example of doing so might be creating one large LUN each of an E+J pair. First, let’s delete our spare drives. To do so, click on Spare Drives in the sidebar. Then click on the Delete tab. Check all of the boxes and then click on the…
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Promise X30 Ethernet Setup Woes
The Promise Vtrak requires 3 IP addresses. There are two controllers and each has an IP for maintenance. There’s also a 3rd, virtual IP. When you initially setup the devices, they pull a DHCP or APIPA address and then you typically use Bonjour to log into the WebPAM for the first time. Once in, you configure the addresses and then viola, you’re good. However, what if something happens? What if you configure the virtual IPs and something happens before you get the maintenance IPs configured. Or what if you never set the maintenance IPs in the first place and always relied on the virtual? Well, the Vtrak used to come…
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Use A Serial Interface with Promise Arrays
Many of us use a Keyspan Serial adapter to manage devices with serial ports on them. Those who find you need to console into devices but hate the fact that you have to either use Zterm (which is no longer maintained) or boot a Windows Virtual Machine will find an application called goSerial pretty handy. GoSerial makes a Keyspan serial to usb adaptor, connected with a null modem cable, useful. You will be in CLI heaven in moments. goSerial can be downloaded here. You can also use the screen command. The screen command will open a virtual terminal and provide the functionality of an old DEC VT100 terminal. Screen is…
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Update the Promise Vtrak Firmware Using SSH
Updating the firmware on Promise arrays is straight forward enough from the WebPAM. But what happens if a firmware update goes funky and you can’t get into the WebPAM any longer (ah, the joys of beta testing)? Well, you can always download an older firmware and reload it provided you can ssh or telnet into the host. Download from http://www.promise.com/support/download.aspx?m=93®ion=en-global for your given model. Then, you need the firmware accessible to the Promise chassis via tftp. A simple tftp GUI tool is available at http://ww2.unime.it/flr/tftpserver. Once configured, log into the Promise array and then use the ptiflash command to update the firmware. In the following command we’ll use the -s option to identify…
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Dot Hill with Xsan
The Promise Vtrak is the only officially supported platform that can be used to provide LUNs to an Xsan. Having said that, there are a number of other storage vendors that are supplying LUNs at this point. And while I don’t really want to speak to that it is worth noting that it brings me joy to watch the ever-expanding number of vendors testing their products for and then marketing to the Xsan community. One that I came across recently is Dot Hill, who did a video showcasing their speedy 2U product at NAB.
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Post at Xsanity on Active Storage
Posted a little article on Xsanity about the new press releases from Active Storage regarding Innerpool and Active Stats. You can find it here: http://www.xsanity.com/article.php/20100415165329925
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Installing a Vtrak for Windows
If you are installing a Vtrak from Apple on Microsoft Windows you can download the drivers from Promise here: http://www.promise.com/support/download/download_eng.asp Having said this, you can use the Promise drivers or generic drivers if you’re using the Promise as targets and connecting to those LUNs via StorNext that are managed by Xsan. The reason for this is that StorNext will manage the LUNs. To see the LUNs, check Windows Device Manager.
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Promise + Density >= Xsan Speeds?
Promise announced that they’ll now be offering 1TB drives in their Vtrak RAIDs. While it’s great to have the additional space, the darn things are just a tiny bit faster too. If bigger drives means faster, why? Doesn’t it seem like bigger drives, and thus more storage density, would make for slower speeds, not faster… Well, storage density is a measure of the number of bits that can be stored on a track, area of surface, or in a given volume. Areal density is the amount of data that can be placed onto a piece of storage, generally measured in bits per square inch. Higher density is typically better as…
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Updating the Promise Firmware
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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Promise RAID: Enable LUN Masking
Using the Promise RAID it is possible to split up an Array into multiple LUNs, which would then be presented to the OS and able to be formatted at will. These do not have to correspond to a Physical segmentation as was the case with the Apple Xserve RAID but instead can be as small or as large as the actual disk array allows. Once split up you can run the LUNs through a fibre channel switch and mount them at will on various servers (although unless the file system supports clustering on only one at a time). If you are using HFS+ for the file system you will then…