EMC Breaks the World Record…

…for the number of people to fit in a mini-cooper.

“EMC is a Storage Record breaker”

Interesting way to launch a product. I watched it live this AM but if you missed it you can watch the whole hour and half replay here – http://emcbreaksrecords.com/.

How many folks can you “store” in a mini-cooper? Go to about 48 minutes in to watch the replay http://emcbreaksrecords.com/ and find out.

Go to about 1:30 to watch Bubba Blackwell‘s virtual storage motorcycle jump!

Failover to Standby Datamover

Last night a tech from EMC was here to update the Control Station and DART code on our Celerra to enable file system deduplication (more about this later).

As part of this process we had to failover to our standby datamover. Thought these commands might be useful later so here they are.

server_2 – Primary datamover
server_3 – Standby datamover

Fail over to standby mover

# server_standby server_2 -a mover

Faults server_x and renames it to server_2.faulted.server_3
Renames server_3 to server_2
server_3 is now online as server_2

During the time it took to failover I dropped 3 pings to the datamover.

Fall back to primary mover

# server_standby server_2.faulted.server_3 -r mover

Renames standby server to server_3
Renames server_2.faulted.server_3 to server_2
server_2 is now back online as the primary mover.

Again I dropped 3 pings while the datamovers switched.

Here are a couple other useful Celerra commands.

Listing your datamovers and their status from the command line:

# /nas/bin/nas_server -l
id type acl slot groupID state name
1 1 0 2 0 server_2
2 4 0 3 0 server_3

You can get this info from the GUI but this is quick if you are logged into the Control Station CLI.

View the nas version running on your datamovers:

# server_version ALL
server_2 : Product: EMC Celerra File Server Version: T5.6.46.410
server_3 : Product: EMC Celerra File Server Version: T5.6.46.410

Basic stuff but it might be useful to have on hand later.

First Hampton Roads User IT Group Meeting

Last night was the first meeting of the Hampton Roads User IT Group meeting. It was held at Burton’s Grill in the Hilltop section of VA Beach. The local EMC sales folks put the meeting together.

Unfortunately the turn out was not that great only a handful of folks showed up. Traffic was terrible and it took a little over an hour to make the 30 minute drive from Chesapeake to VA Beach, probably a reason for the low turn out.

Despite the small crowd it was still a great event. Tom Lennon from RSA Security did a presentation on some of their current and upcoming offerings. RSA’s log collection and analysis product – enVision – looks pretty interesting, definitely something to get a little more info on. I got to say a little bit about my experiences at EMC World (I am still working my blog post about it – so much good stuff, so little time). Chatted with a couple of other EMC customers and partners about technologies they are planning on or currently using – AVAMAR, VMware, Celerra, etc.

The appetizers were good, the drinks were cold, and Stephanie & Joe from EMC were great hosts.

A couple of folks from Varrow out of NC were there and it was pretty cool chatting with them. Check out their community blog at http://www.varrowblogs.com/ – some good info there.

The local EMC folks are planning to have User IT Group meetings once a quarter. I’ll be sure to post when the next one is, hope you can make it.

Every vSphere Link You Need to Get Started at vSphere-land

At least that’s what the post says… http://vsphere-land.com/news/vsphere-the-missing-links-every-vsphere-link-you-need-to-get-started.html

Every link or not, there are a bunch of great resources for vSphere 4.

I am just back from EMC World and I have a lot information I will be posting soon about the conference but right now I am going to enjoy the holiday weekend. Have a great one!