I posted another article at Xsanity last week, but forgot to mention it here. You can find the article here. Basically it’s a walkthrough of using the fibreconfig command and how it relates to Xsan. Hope you enjoy!
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Xsanity: Using Removable Media with Xsan
I posted another article on Xsanity. This one started out as an article on how to label LUNs from the command line, but ended up something completely different. It still explains how to do it from the command line, but since I wrote it while flying it ended up being more tailored to doing it on a USB jump drive since they don’t allow me to take an Xserve, Qlogic 9200 and a Promise RAID to my seat on the plane with me. Which is really a shame ’cause I could get SOOOO much done that way. Anyway, the article can be found here.
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Finding the Serial Number on Tandbergs
The 1×10 VXA2 drives are kinda’ popular with smaller Xsan installations. While they don’t seem to have a ton of issues as with anything that has moveable parts at some point they’re gonna’ break down. When it happens you’re gonna’ need the serial numbers. This might be for the autoloader itself or for the tape drives on the inside. So where to look for these… Well, never fear, there’s no need to take the darn things apart. For the serial number of the autoloader, you can just look on the label on the back panel of the device or if you want to be one of the cool kids, from…
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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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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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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: