Diary of a Bad Golfer

One of the things I really like about NetApp is the fact that they have an ONTAP simulator, which is surprisingly powerful. I have used it a lot in the past for POC testing. I use it in VMware Workstation 6 with a minimal Debian install (no GUI). After installing the simulator (available from NetApp’s NOW site) it comes with 2 100mb disks. To add more disks there is a script in the /sim directory to run. I used this process to add 8 1000mb disks to my simulator.

/sim/makedisks -n 8 -t 5

Note: If you want to add a different type/size of disk, open up the makedisks script to see the available options.

Once that is done run the simulator with /sim/runsim.sh

After you login to the simulator, the new disks will show up as failed, follow this process to fix.

priv set diag
disk unfail -s v
disk zero spares

Once you are done, type priv set to exit from the diagnostic mode.

Once that is complete you can create a new aggregate using the 1000mb disks you have created. It probably goes without saying but since it is just a simulator uncheck the box for Double Parity when creating the aggregate so you can maximize your storage. Thanks to the NetApp Simulator and being able to use ESX on VMware Workstation I am able to have 2 ESX servers in a cluster with DRS/HA using SAN storage from 2 NetApp Simulators that replicate between each other with SnapMirror - extremely useful for learning.

Dell announced Monday plans to buy IP storage-area network vendor, EqualLogic for $US1.4 billion, strengthening an already booming part of Dell’s business.

The news of the planned deal comes just a week after CEO, Michael Dell hinted the company could be in the market for some bigger-than-usual acquisitions.

EqualLogic, formed in 2001, sells iSCSI storage appliances and in August filed to go public, something it now won’t have to do.

Dell will add EqualLogic’s PS Series iSCSI appliances and technology to its portfolio of PowerVault and Dell/EMC storage arrays, part of a $US600 million business for Dell in its second fiscal 2008 quarter ended Aug. 3 (server revenue totalled $1.6 billion in that period). The company has not clarified its plans to rebrand EqualLogic’s products, but says that it will still sell them through the extensive channel EqualLogic has established. Dell sells a lot of its storage products through EMC, making up 10 per cent of EMC’s accounts receivable in 2006.

“This acquisition is a key part of our strategy to simplify IT and to drive virtualisation from Dell’s enterprise portfolio,” director of storage operations, Mike Arterbury, said.

EqualLogic’s products have been adopted in corporations that are also deploying virtualisation. Dell expects that adding them to its portfolio will allow customers to further simplify their IT setups.

“EqualLogic did a brilliant job of marrying up storage and virtualization,” senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group, Steve Duplessie, said. “The company was basically giving away VMware with their machines. It was a great sales job.”

Duplessie’s reaction to the sale price was “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Fellow analyst, Greg Schulz, of Storage I/O also found the price eye-opening, but said: “If you go by the recent valuation of storage IPOs lately, it is more in line.”

EqualLogic counts among its customers Dickinson-Wright, the Royal British Legion and Babson College.

Dell’s history of acquisitions has been limited primarily to services organizations and recently consumer gaming vendors. The acquisition of EqualLogic would mark Dell’s first buyout of a storage vendor since it snapped up earlyvirtualisation company, ConvergeNet, in 1999 for $US348 million. Subsequent work with ConvergeNet failed to generate a product.

The EqualLogic deal is expected to close late in Dell’s fiscal fourth quarter (which ends in February) or early in its fiscal first quarter (which ends in May).

Source

One of the new features of Leopard is Time Machine a feature that automatically backs up your Mac. The main thing I didn’t like about it is that I have 2+ TB of disk space on my file server, and only a 250 gb USB drive connected to my Mac, using Time Machine the only way I could use it was with the attached USB drive. But I found there is a hack to allow you to use Time Machine with a Windows networked share. From a terminal window type:

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Then go to System Preferences, Time Machine and click on Change Disk and you can now select your network share.