Whats been happening…
Well its been 7 months since my last post here. Since then the family and I have moved back to Windy Wellington in NZ and I am now working for Computer Concepts Limited as a Technical Consultant. Things have been very busy and the first gig I had was to design and deploy an active-active ...
NetApp Implementation
Last week I deployed a NetApp V3140 HA pair with SAS DS4243 and FC DS14 MK4 shelves, a total usable space of 70TB. This kit was uplifted from our primary DC and relocated and rebuit in our secondary DC. A whole day to rack and stack and cable, the next day to update all the ...
Reclaiming Thin Provisioned Space – part 2
Last month I did an initial post on this topic, and here is the follow up. Our environment consists of dual 3PAR P10000 SANs and all storage at the controller level is thin provisioned. All 3PAR volumes are configured for Zero Detect. We run approximately 40 physical servers and 450 VMs on ESXi 5.1 U1 ...
Thin-Provisioned Space Reclaiming
(Posted LinkedIn Sept 2013) We have been extremely lucky to secure licences from Raxco Software (thanks goes out to Bob Nolan & team) for their PerfectStorage product that automates thin provisioned space reclaiming via SCSI UNMAP and their Smart Zero Fill technology. Our environment consists of dual 3PAR P10400 (v400) SANs, 85% virtualised on vSphere ...
A good lesson learnt on my 3PAR
(Posted LinkedIn July 2013) We have a couple of 3PAR P10400 SANs with Synchronous Replication (Remote Copy) of volumes between our DCs. All of our Remote Copy volumes sit on the same disk tier on both sides, with AO moving hot spots up and down as required. I tuned some volumes a few weeks back ...
HP 3PAR Adaptive Optimization – auto tiering
(Posted LinkedIn July 2013) Turned on AO today for the first time. Really surprised at what it moved around between cpg/tiers. Data that I would have expected to be low I/O moved up tiers, and vice-versa for data that I would have considered higher I/O moved down. Good to see it is idenitfying the hot/cold ...
Converting 3PAR 3.1.2 Full/Thick Volumes to Thin Volumes – online
(Posted LinkedIn April 2013) From the InForm 3.1.2 GUI I wanted to tune many volumes that we had initially provisioned as Thick to Thin. I did not want to take the volumes offline. There is no option for this in the GUI that I can see, it needs to be done from the CLi. The ...
3PAR P10400 Remote Copy Fibre Channel – Setup and some basic testing
(Posted LinkedIn March 2013) Last week I installed the RCFC cards in to our 2x P10400 3PARs. Cabled all up via our Brocades and zoned everything 1:1. We have a 3PAR in each DC. The RCFC cards are installed to slot 1 of each node, there is 4 ports per card, we are only utilising ...
3PAR Persistent Ports
(Posted LinkedIn April 2013) We installed more HBAs in our 3PARs this week which involved the nodes going offline 1 at a time. Most impressed with the persistent port feature as non of my 22 VMware hosts detected a path going offline during the upgrade. The initial zoning is a bit painful but that is ...
Musings from a past life 