Disaster Recovery: A Tape Survival Story
Computerworld is running a feature on how Estes Express Lines survived Hurricane Gaston dumping four feet of water into their data center. Dick Cosby, Estes’s systems administrator, is quoted as saying “You are out of your mind if you think you can live without tape. It makes zero sense to put up an all-SAN solution with data de-duplication. It is very expensive and not nearly as reliable.”
I had dinner with Dick at an IBM event a year ago. We spent most of dinner talking about how Estes had recovered from the hurricane. I was extremely impressed by Estes’s ability to fully recover even though the magnitude of the disaster outstripped anything they had planned for. These guys have earned the right to make observations about what does and doesn’t make sense in a disaster recovery/business continuance strategy. Unlike most of us in the vendor community, Estes has been there, done that, and lived to tell about it.
Filed Under Disaster Recovery, StorageAnti-Hacking Your Life
I’m a geek, and like all good geeks, I love new shiny gadgets. I like creative and unexpected uses of technology. I like things that pander to my short attention span, distract me just long enough to wreck my train of thought, and then fade away into obscurity. Needless to say, I’m a GTD victim.
I enjoy all the usual lifehack sites. I’ve read David Allen’s books. I’ve used Remember the Milk, Nozbe, Sandy, Jott, and others I don’t remember at the moment. I’ve done paper based productivity systems, online productivity systems, systems on Windows and systems on Mac. The only consistent thing about them is the fact that they’ve generally survived for about a week before I’ve moved on to the next new shiny system. I’ve managed to fall into the trap of spending more time tweaking the system than actually doing anything.
Apparently, I’m far from alone in this respect. I recently found The Growing Life, a great site that helps put things into perspective for gadget obsessed geeks like me. A recent post, The Life Hack Misnomer, is one of my all-time favorites. I’d already figured out that I needed to step back and reassess my approach to productivity, but Craig kind of drove the point home.
I’m not likely to stop reading Lifehacker, and I’m certain that there are new and shinier gadgets waiting to distract me. I am, however,
Filed Under LifeExtreme Data Recovery: Salvaging Data from the Space Shuttle Columbia
I clearly remember the morning of February 1st, 2003 when I heard that the Space Shuttle Columbia had been destroyed over the central United States. It was a vivid reminder of the dangers of space exploration. In addition to the loss of life, all of the data from the on-board experiments was also presumed lost. Now, five years later, one of the experiments has been completed thanks to a remarkable piece of data recovery.
The CVX-2 experiment stored its data on a 400MB Seagate hard drive. The drive was recovered from the debris, and although badly damaged by re-entry and impact, engineers at Kroll Ontrack were able to recover 90% of the data on the drive. This allowed the CVX-2 researchers to complete their experiment and bring a 20-year research effort to conclusion.
Hat’s off to the engineers at Kroll Ontrack. This is a feat on par with IBM’s recovery of the Space Shuttle Challenger’s flight data recorder tapes.
Source: Blocks and Files (includes a photo of the hard drive)
Filed Under StorageA Brief Diversion Into Politics
I have no intention of delving into politics on a regular basis. There are plenty of political blogs, and I don’t feel like adding to the mix on anything approaching a regular basis. This morning, however, I came across a piece on the Art of Manliness blog that really made me sit back and think.
Entitled “What Happened to Wartime Sacrifice?“, Brett & Kate McKay delve into the sacrifices that my grandparents’ generation made during World War II and then to the sacrifice free world that we live in today. While it’s true that World War II was less politically ambiguous than the Iraq War and occupation seems to be, I can’t argue with the premise that we here at home have been asked to sacrifice nothing, while our men and women in uniform are potentially sacrificing everything. It really made me stop and think.
No matter what you think of the Iraq War, you owe it to yourself to read this piece and really think about it.
Filed Under PoliticsReboot
One of the great things about my new job is that I get to work across all of the IBM hardware brands. One of the largest challenges in my new job is that I get to work across all of the IBM hardware platforms. While I have a background in storage and POWER based systems, I still have a lot to learn about the Mainframe and Modular systems.
So, instead of spending time blogging, I’ve been heads-down getting crash courses in all things z10. Next on the agenda is VMWare. I’ve been learning all sorts of interesting things about virtualization across multiple platforms. I’m still putting together my ideas and hope to be able to form them into posts shortly. I’m also planning to continue the storage networking discussion, but it will trickle out slowly.
So, sorry for neglecting you. I love learning new things and got a little too focused on doing so.
Filed Under MetaIn the Beginning, There Was SCSI…
Any discussion of modern storage protocols, must begin with SCSI. From its humble beginnings in the 1980s, SCSI is nearly ubiquitous as the underlying technology used by most major storage protocols today. SCSI is an official standard architecture and is overseen by the T10 committee of the InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards.
SCSI is both a physical cabling specification and a command set. For the purposes of this discussion, I will only be referring to SCSI’s logical definition. It’s been a long time since I’ve worried about SCSI cable lengths, wide, ultra-wide, HVD, LVD, etc. and I don’t plan to start now. Those days are gone.
The SCSI command protocol lives on however. At it’s core, SCSI is a client-server protocol with some special terminology. Here are some common SCSI concepts that are useful to know:
- Initiator - The device which sends (initiates) the SCSI command. This is usually a disk adapter card in the computer system.
- Target - The device which receives and processes the SCSI command. This is generally a storage device (i.e. disk or tape).
- Bus - A physical or logical connection between a collection of initiators and targets. A bus typically contains a single initiator and many targets, but multi-initiator buses are allowed.
- Logical Unit (LU) - The logical representation of a storage device. A logical unit may be a single SCSI hard drive, or as is common in large storage arrays, a logical unit may be a subdivision of the larger array. (It’s possible for a large storage array to contain hundreds of logical units.)
- Logical Unit Number (LUN) -A numerical given to an individual logical unit that uniquely identifies it on a given bus. The term ‘LUN’ is commonly used to refer to the logical unit itself, but this usage is technically incorrect. LUNs are used to identify the source and destination for SCSI commands.
I’m not going to cover the specifics of the commands. For that, please visit the T10 site or Wikipedia. My intent for this installment was to provide these basic definitions and plant the idea that SCSI is the foundation for many of the protocols that we’ll be discussing in future installments.
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Filed Under StorageStorage Networking: How Many Protocols Do We Need?
There seems to be an ever increasing number of storage protocols entering the marketplace. Fibre Channel, iSCSI, FC-IP, FCoE, SATA, SAS, and others are available for use, but making sense of the choices can be confusing. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll spend some time explaining and analyzing the different protocols in an effort to differentiate and position them. Each protocol has its own strengths and weaknesses, and no matter what your favorite vendor tells you, there is no single perfect protocol.
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Filed Under StorageWho Backs Up the Data in Web 2.0?
Shifting resources from the desktop to the web is the hallmark of Web 2.0. I don’t need an office software suite installed on every system I use. I can connect to Google Docs from my Windows desktop, my MacBook, or even my EeePC and effortlessly edit the same document using the same interface across each platform. Companies have moved their entire customer relationship management systems to the web using services such as salesforce.com. Using computing services on the web reduces the need for individuals or companies to manage their own information technology needs. I, myself, am a frequent user of services like Google, Remember The Milk, Jott, and Sandy.
Along with online applications, storage has also been making its way into the cloud. While the concept of a storage utility isn’t new, only recently has the cost of storage and bandwidth come down enough for internet based storage to become a consumer product. The idea of effortlessly storing data somewhere on the internet is attractive. I just did a home computing inventory and discovered that I have nearly 2TB of disk. Of that 2TB, more than half of it is tied up as backup drives. While I am able to survive the failure of any single drive, if I lose my house due to fire or natural disaster, I’ll most likely lose all my data. Applications like JungleDisk, Box.net, and the .mac iDisk, all provide a simple means for off-site storage. (I’ve been looking at JungleDisk.)
An interesting thing has started to happen with these online storage providers. Instead of using them as a place to store an off-site backup, users are starting to use them as primary storage. This makes me nervous. Likewise, all of the web applications I mentioned above use their own storage devices to hold their user’s data. This also makes me nervous. Privacy and security issues aside, who backs it up? If my only copy of my data lives inside of one of these online storage providers, what happens when that data becomes inaccessible?
Unfortunately, this scenario seems to be playing out. As covered by Web Worker Daily, and ReadWriteWeb, Omnidrive seems to have suddenly closed its doors, taking its user’s data with it. This is a scary scenario for anyone who makes extensive use on online services. Unfortunately, this scenario shouldn’t surprise anyone. Businesses, especially ones offering very cheap (or free) services on the web often close their doors.
My advice to everyone is to take a hard look at data you are storing on other people’s servers. Carefully evaluate what you are storing online, and create a contingency plan for use when that online resource (for whatever reason) isn’t available. If it’s important, back it up somewhere you control. And keep that backup updated. Using Web 2.0 applications is fine, just remember that only you are responsible for your data. Putting it on the web in someone else’s data center, doesn’t make it their problem.
Filed Under Internet, StorageHappy New Year 2008!
Happy New Year to everyone! I hope that you all have a happy, healthy, and prosperous new year.
Filed Under MetaAnother View of the Fibre Channel vs. iSCSI Protocol War
Jon Toigo at Enterprise Systems has posted his predictions for storage in 2008. He has an excellent alternative view of the fibre channel vs. iSCSI protocol battle. Despite the fact that I recently panned iSCSI, Jon raises interesting and valid points about fibre channel’s shortcomings, especially in the area of interoperability.
“Unlike FC switches, where standards have been developed to ensure that vendors can make their switches non-interoperable with one another even if they fully comply with the letter of ANSI standards, iSCSI switches (or rather IP switches) will work and play together.”
I, personally, as well as several of my customers, have been bitten by SAN interoperability issues. I’ve even griped on occasion that FC SANs should be as easy to assemble as IP networks. I just hadn’t extended that thought to iSCSI. Thanks, Jon, for opening my eyes to this one.
Interoperability issues aside, I still see fibre channel remaining the dominant storage connection protocol in 2008. Perhaps 2009 will finally be the year of iSCSI.
Filed Under Predictions, Storage-
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