January 7th, 2010 by Hescominsoon

ZFS – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

I am going to look into this more.  This feature alone would allow storage admins to better utilize storage space.  Right now it’s only available on FreeBSD 8.0 and Solaris.  I may have to fire up a BSD VM on a dedicated drive set to learn how to utilize this technology.  Right now it’s CLI only..no gui(that i know of) to make things “easier”..:)

December 23rd, 2009 by Hescominsoon

AMD Does RAID On a Chip – www.enterprisestorageforum.com.

This thing is FRAID or software raid.  It’s no better than ICHx or any other chipset based “raid” system.   When you see somehting like this:

Dot Hill’s RAIDCore technology enables host-based RAID 0, 1, 5, 10 and 50 directly on motherboard SATA I/O ports, and the same software stack with additional features enabled may also be used for SAS systems that use a built-in or PCIe host adapter-based SAS/SATA chipset.

Also a bit a googling reveals a small thread where I already researched this:

http://www.opensubscriber.com/message/centos@centos.org/1580168.html

The host based is what gives it away.  Anything that is host based puts the processing load on your cpu.  In the case of RAID 5 or 6 that load is high. Never turn this garbage on..use a real RAID controller.

December 1st, 2009 by Hescominsoon

Channelweb Connect: SMB Channel Voice: SMB Storage Challenges – Two Nice MS Utilities.

The Search Server Express is one thing i like.  It allows you to have your server index by content everything on your server including PDF’s.  This is one i am going to look into for all of my clients.

November 2nd, 2009 by Hescominsoon

I reccommended to my Mother in Law that a netbook would be perfect for her based on her needs.  It IS perfect except she is running out of room on the 8 gig SSD.  I went to find an upgrade for her SSD and found one by a company called Runcore.  Let’s jsut say 160 bucks later and 5 days of pain the SSd is not bootable…the mini simply refuses to detect the drive.  This is apparently a widespread issue which I jsut found out about.  Unfortunatly returns look like a 15% hit.  Lovely.

This is why when I recommend a product it’s only after it’s been out for a while.  I will not deviate from that again.

September 18th, 2009 by Hescominsoon

SSDs, pNFS Will Test RAID Controller Design – www.enterprisestorageforum.com.

Current RAID controllers(real raid controllers not fake ones) are going to start hitting a serious bottleneck before too long.  Once SSD’s start getting into the market it’s not going to be how many requests but how fast you can transfer the data because with SSD’s the request is nearly instantly fulfilled.  SSD”s are going to bring in bandwidth problems fully to the forefront for the first time in decades…let’s hope the storage vendors are ready.

March 12th, 2009 by Hescominsoon

Many folks have not realized that modern filesystems in Windows negate the need for partitions. Back in the 16 bit days when partitions could not exceed 2 gigs or less this was necessary.  Partitioning is a throwback to dos and in the modern file systems this is actually a hindrance. Partitioning modern hard disks with modern filesystems is a waste of space and incurs a performance hit. Also considering that nearly everything you do on a windows system generates data on the system partition over time it is going to grow.  Also you lose disk space due to partitioning now. NTFS uses much smaller clusters than FAT32. When you chop the disk up the space you lose due to formatting the new partition cancels whatever benefit there may be to doing a partition in terms of disk space. What partitioning does now is now you have 1 MFT per partition. The MFT is the master file table which is basically a database of where all the files are located on the partition. Every partition you put on the disk gives you another MFT to worry about. This also introduces a performance overhead since if you access partition 2 on drive one the hard drive has to head to the second MFT, look it up, and then go find the file. Also if you copy a file from partition one 2 partition 2 now the system has to physically move the bits from one partition to the other partition on the same drive AND update two MFT’s. If everything is on the same partition then moving the files is merely a function of updating the one MFT and it’s done. The performance gain is not trivial. Try moving a gigabyte of files on a partitioned drive between partitions and then do it on a non-partitioned drive. The difference is night and day. Now if you want multiple drive letters don’t partition.  Instead setup another array either on  the same controller or preferably on another controller. Sticking with one partition simplifies things greatly:

1.  no extra drive letters to manage during system administration and most importantly during system recovery
2.  no disk space loss overhead from partitioning and formatting of partitions
3.  No performance hits from the hard drive(s) having to cross logical boundaries due to the fact that even if you specify hings    like exchange and sharepoint onto a different partition something is still kept and used often on the c: drive

March 6th, 2009 by Hescominsoon

I have spent the past few days working with level .5 techs(in terms of the knowledge of their own product) trying to get carbonite to restore the data it so willingly allowed me to upload.  Nowhere on the site does it mention a 50 gig cap and then they slow you down below dialup speeds.  Nor do they tell you that once the restore goes bad it’s going to take tons and tons of e-mails with you getting canned non-helpful suggestions.  Only after i finally uninstalled carbonite and contacted the CEO and started posting my negative reviews did they FINALLY give me some advanced things to try..by this time i was done and was working on my recovery from the .vhd file.

I just got an e-mail from carbonite..they ahve given me a full refund and have kept the account active..I can’t trust my data to them so it’s going to be an empty sheel from now on.

March 6th, 2009 by Hescominsoon

Luckily mounting the .vhd worked..but not without it’s own issues.  The instructions i talked about in my last post forget one thing.  The weird filename that the system generates make the vhdmount program barf.  I also wound up having to put the files inside the vhdmount folder onto the drive in the same folder as the vhd file.  I also had to rename the vhd file. So here’s my restoration procedure:

1.  Reformat the server

2.  Reload SBS onto said server

3.  get sbs setup

4.  download MS virtual Server 2005 sp1 for 64 bit

5. install just vhdmount

6.  copy the files from vhdmount(make sure you ahve hidden files in view) to the directory on the usb drive that contains the vhd file

7.  rename the vhd file to backup.vhd

8. type:  vhdmount /m backup.vhd

9. in a minute or two you should have another drive mounted.

10. take ownership of the entire drive

11. change the permisison so admins have all permissions.

Now you can copy the files from the drive to your sbs server.

March 5th, 2009 by Hescominsoon

I was excited about carbonite.  The backup side works great…the restore is a disaster.  Two days after a server crash and i am waiting on carbonite to give me back my files.  SBS 2008 backup sucks for DR and i was depending on carbonite to save my behind.  After days of waiting and watching carbonite stay at zero percent and stop restoring i did some searching.  Carbonite does not clearly say there’s a 50 gig limit or they throttle you to less than dialup.  I have also seen numerous complaints about the restore process being slow or not working at all.

I wound up having to nuke half of my backup(luckily i had backed up those files to another usb drive) that brought my backup form 74 gigs to 30 gigs.  We will see if carbonite goes beyond 5.2k files this time before dying.

It looks like i won’t be using carbonite for any of my clients….also Leo laporte needs to get off hte carbonite bandwagon.  I am curious if he has actually tried to restore anything using carbonite yet?

*update* nope carbonite is a total failure.  I am now having to do a manual restore from my sbs backup in a way it wasn’t designed to do.  I hope i can get my data back this way at least.