So, you would think that 12 spindles would be…you know…fast. Even if you took 12 spindles, made them into a RAID 10 array, they’d still be fast. That’s what I’d think, anyway. It turns out, my new EMC AX4 is having a bit of a problem. None of the machines hooked to it can reach [...]

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Last week, I installed all of the equipment in our beta site. Due to issues with the power at my office, I wasn’t able to touch the blades for the month or so before they went in the rack, and the last time they were powered on, I didn’t have the storage array to make [...]

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I’m in the office working today and I figured out the best way (for me, anyway) to resize SAN LUNs without rebooting the server. I figured that I should document it. To paraphase Linus, Only wimps use internal wikis: _real_ men just document their important stuff on blogs, and let the rest of the world [...]

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If you’ve got network storage, whether NAS or SAN, you probably care how fast it is. There are a lot of ways to increase speed, such as choosing the right RAID level, making sure you have the right spindle count. (Incidentally, I found a very interesting, if somewhat lacking, RAID estimator that is fun to [...]

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Alright, I’m once again appealing to people with more experience than I have. Waist deep in learning AMANDA, I have questions about tape labeling. I’m attempting to find the best practices for labeling tapes, both physically (via barcode stickers on the tape) and the “logical” label written using the ‘amlabel’ command. Anyone who knows better, [...]

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I have been researching storage for the past few days. I’ve been concentrating on iSCSI, since I was trying to keep costs down, and a fiber switch is pretty expensive (especially if I want to use it). While researching, I chanced upon a technology I hadn’t heard before: ATA Over Ethernet (AoE). Unlike iSCSI, which [...]

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