Category: Replication

Disaster recovery / data replication posts

Multivendor or Single Source? Is there a right answer?

Every time I turn around it seems I seem to be running into the same question. Is it better to be multi-vendor or single source? Well the easy answer to that is, it depends.  Different vendors do things differently, work better/worse with some hardware, etc. The arguments in favor of a single-vendor solution is easy.  …

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On tape…

Ok, I have no problem with tape.  It’s a *GREAT* backup medium when your requirement is portability for massive amounts of data and you’re not replicating said data. If I had to ship 400TB of backups to Iron-Mountain, to protect against the earthquake-to-end-all-earthquakes tape would be my FIRST choice (though maybe, as a GIANT CAVE …

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How to tell if your sales rep hates you….

I just got the following job posting and it made me, literally, laugh out loud, spitting latte all over my laptop. If your sales rep allows you to do something like this, it’s a fair bet that s/he hates you (or is planning to buy your company out of bankruptcy later). “WANTED: VMWare 1-month resident to …

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Recoverpoint vs. Conventional Replication

Ok – I see the surface benefits of a third party replication appliance, such as Recoverpoint. I even sat through a long discussion on it. I’m still totally on the fence but there are a few questions I need satisfactorally answered before I can recommend this to my customer. I want to ask my readers, …

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Open Replicator

Pretty cool toy.  Essentially it’s SanCopy for Symmetrix. So a customer is particularly reticent about upgrades, to the point that they are going from an 8830 directly to a DMX-4.  This is an easy data migration, but they have a handful of test/dev servers that are going to stay on the 8830 for the time …

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Clariion – Mirrorview – Cisco – FCIP

Got into a scary situation this week.  Got called into help with a customer with a Mirrorview implementation. Situation was:  Customer had Mirrorview/S set up within the existing switch environment, replication worked perfectly. Then they reconfigured the switches to run FCIP so they could start replication to a remote site.  This is where things went …

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Frying Pan / Fire

Well – after moving along for a few weeks at a nice leisurely pace, I find myself working on six different projects.  Loads of fun, especially when three of them are just similar enough to get the details confused. Got an iSCSI install next weekend though, this should be interesting.  I think I have a …

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The beatings will continue…

…Until morale improves. Trying to run 4, FCIP trunks over a half a DS3 is a lot like raising a teenager. Sometimes it looks like it’s working, but in reality it’s just screwing around playing video games. Actually, my favorite is that “Raising a teenager is like trying to nail JELL-O to a tree”  I’m …

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Cisco FCIP and SRDF

Been a while since I’ve written anything – I’m not even sure if I still have a readership. I’ve been working an average of 60 hours a week on a single project these days.  Doing a datacenter migration and consolidation.  Basically moving 4 Symm-5 generation systems into a single DMX-3. The funniest part of this …

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SRDF woes….

Ok, for about 4 months I’ve had an SRDF problem that has been kicking my ass.  SRDF over Ethernet presents a host of new problems, unique to Ethernet.  First, and mostly – the RE adapters want to see *ALL* of the remote adapters in the RDF group.  That means if you have four RDF/Ethernet (RE) …

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