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 Those who find you need to console into devices but hate the fact that you have to either use Zterm (which is no longer maintained) or boot a Windows Virtual Machine will find an application called goSerial pretty handy.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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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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Xsan 2: No Limits (kinda')
Xsan 2 does remove some of the limitations that you encountered with Xsan 1. But not a ton of them. There are still a few limitations, most of which can easily be worked around. The first is in the number of storage pools that can be in a single volume, which is 512. The second is the number of LUNs that can be in a storage pool, which is 32. This isn’t to say that you can actually put 512 X 32 LUNs (or 16384 LUNs) in a volume because you can’t. A volume can actually only have 512 LUNs, whether or not you split them into multiple storage pools.…
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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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Keyspan Serial Adapter
When you’re doing Xsan deployments you often run into situations where a serial adapter comes in handy. It might be the serial port on an Xserve, a Promise Vtrak, an Xserve RAID, a managed switch, a Fibre Channel switch or a UPS but it seems like it’s just a super useful little thing to have. Now, since the MacBook and MacBook pro do not have serial ports that leaves you hanging a little. So, this little guy comes in pretty handy: http://www.keyspan.com/products/usa19hs/
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Xsan: Promise RAID Command Line Arguments
about View utility information. array View or edit array information. Create, edit or delete a new or existing array. Create, edit or delete logical drives in an existing array. To physically locate an array in an enclosure. Accept an incomplete array condition. battery View battery information or to recondition a battery. bga View status of all current background activities. Enable or disable relevant background activities. Modify the background task rate for each of the background tasks. buzz View buzzer status, enable/disable and turn on/off buzzer. chap View, create, edit or delete a CHAP…
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Xsan: Video Formats and Bandwidth
As many environments will use multiple formats it is important to define the required bandwidth for various formats. By lowering or increasing your format you will have the capacity to have more or less streams concurrently running against your SAN respectively: Standard Definition MiniDV, DVCAM, and DVCPRO – 3.6MBps DVCPRO 50 – 7.7MBps Uncompressed SD (8-bit) – 20MBps Uncompressed SD (10-bit) – 27MBps Compressed High Definition DVCPRO HD – 5.8MBps to 14MBps Apple ProRes 422 – 5.25 to 27.5 MBps Redcode RAW (24fps) – 28 MBps Uncompressed High Definition 720p 24fps – 46MBps 720p 30fps – 50MBps 720p 60fps – 100MBps 1080 24p (8-bit) – 98MBps 1080i (8-bit) – 120MBps…
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Practical ILM
I originally posted this at http://www.318.com/TechJournal The amount of data used by Small Businesses is on target to rise 30% to 35% in 2006. Sarbanes-Oxley, HIPPA and SEC Rule 17a-4 have introduced new regulations on the length of time data must be kept and in what format. Not only must data be kept, it must be backed up and secured. These factors have the cost of data storage for the Small Business increasing exponentially. Corporations valued at more than 75 million dollars are generating 1.6 billion gigabytes of data per year. Small and medium sized companies can reap the benefits of developments being made with larger corporations. Different methods and…