Here we present two ways of thinking about the issue of boot media in cooperation with Open-E DSS V6. Take a look below – there are following options to consider: The first is to use a Small Boot Volume that resides on the Hardware RAID controller. This is a very reliable and stabile boot media and there is no need to buy an extra boot media. The small 2GB logical volume on the RAID Array [...]

Do you love your data as much as your MacBook®? Well, this is the article (and software) for you. Apple Time Machine® is backup software developed by Apple® Inc. and was first implemented on Mac OS® 10.5 (Leopard®). It cares about your data – your funny photos, important documents or MP3s – no matter what. It helps to store them in a safe way, so even if your expensive, unique and perfect MacBook® Pro will [...]

Want to reduce energy costs and the risk of possible data loss? A dynamic increase of data volumes leads to greater the hardware requirements and greater power consumption – forces us to search for new solutions that can reduce the costs associated with this. So, every new chance to significantly reduce energy costs because of hardware power usage and cooling requirements is more than welcome in most organizations. The same goes for every additional possibility [...]

So you need Asynchronous volume replication badly and you only find the Synchronous volume replication is on our feature list. Not all is lost as we can still provide a good solution for this requirement for your customers. An equivalent solution that can convert a volume image into files will help here. Let’s consider a Windows 2008R2 server or VMware ESXi server hosting many virtual machines. In both cases the customer will need to have [...]

We are sure some of you have thought about DRBD – about its use and operation. Here is some information about it – a few benefits, some drawbacks, tips and solutions. The built-in volume replication mechanism is based on the open source DRBD which was being developed by the Austrian company LINBIT. It is a popular and widely used software for High Availability (HA) Clusters. Volume replication is used to create a mirror copy of [...]

Very often, storage product users do not know what kind of performance numbers to expect in real operations. Why do storage vendors claim such great performance when measured by an industry accepted reference tool like IOmeter, but in production database applications are often very slow? The biggest difference comes from how the data is being read from the disk. Is it in sequential blocks or is it scattered in random blocks all over the drive? [...]

We wanted to provide you an in-depth explanation of the Ping-Node offering clarifications on its function and usage. Incorrect Ping-Node configuration and functionality can cause problems with HA clusters. The importance of this post is critical for a proper setup with the iSCSI Failover. Why do we need a ping-node or rather ping-nodes? DSS V6 iSCSI Failover (and soon NFS Failover) uses a heartbeat to check the Primary and Secondary hosts to each other. We [...]

How to provide access to shared data using Linux based servers and cluster file system? In this post we are going to present quick and painless way to configure the whole environment that will consist of a few servers using Linux Debian Squeeze and another one with DSS V6 as a storage provider. To be more interesting we are going to present also an alternative way to manage DSS V6.

There are plenty of benchmarking tools available but storage professionals mostly use IOmeter. Unfortunately IOmeter is a little tricky to use. You really need to read the user manual first. I have frequently seen users trying to run IOmeter tests without success. Being human, most of us hate to read the manual and with IOmeter this can lead to problems. I hope this short post will help you to get the wanted results. First off, [...]

I guess that all of us know that caching the data usually increase the performance, but I worried if all of us are aware about risk that caching the data provides and how to minimize them? That’s the reason why I decided to write this short article about it. Therefore, let us analyze the situation when we are using device (HDD) connected to our OS via iSCSI. Server that provides this device as LU through [...]