League of Professional System Administrators - Storage

Mixing Multiple Volume Managers (especially ZFS and VxVM)

spp — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 13:15:13 -0700

I've recently had a number of projects at work that want to mix multiple volume managers on a single server, specifically ZFS and VxVM for SAN volumes (actually, three including SVM for internal boot disk mirroring). The projects generally are for database servers, and want to use VxVM for database volumes because ZFS currently has some serious limitation on database size (limited number of devices recommended in a single zpool) and performance (single threaded checksumming, for one). However, at the same time, they want to have access to some of ZFS's features (in particular, the ability to oversubscribe filesystems, dynamic resize, snapshots and rollback) for some of the other filesystems.

Storage software should be able to notice and warn if an about-to-be-deleted object has been recently accessed

jennine — Wed, 23 May 2007 10:11:55 -0700

While taking part in a storage install the last few days, including creating and deleting quite a few RAID groups and so forth, I've had to click on quite a few "Are you SURE?!" dialog boxes, even for completely idle, never-used LUNs. Here's an idea for storage management folks: keep a bitmap of recently-accessed LUNs. Specifically, keep two; every five minutes zero the old one and flip them, then set a bit in the active bitmap for each LUN when it's accessed. Then pop up an extra "You've accessed this LUN in the last five minutes! Are you SUPER-SURE?!" scary box if someone tries to delete or in some other way imperil one of those.

USB to SATA interface cable

doug — Wed, 20 Dec 2006 11:13:10 -0800

Short Description:
Adapter to plug SATA drive into USB port

Home Page:
www.buyextras.com/sahiquusbtos.html?gclid=COe-68jdoYkCFQQdgQodVUg5OQ

Release Date:
Wed, 2006-11-01 12:00

Status:
New

Long Description:

The Hi-Speed USB 2.0 to Serial ATA (SATA) Drive Adapter creates a bridge between one USB 1.1/2.0 port and one Serial ATA or SATA-based mass storage device port. The USB 2.0 to SATA Drive Adapter turns any SATA hard drive into a convenient external drive. Easily transfer files from computer or notebook, back up files, or store large file archives on hard drives. The Hi-Speed USB 2.0 interface provides for easy installation with its Plug and Play design. The adapter supports all existing Serial ATA SATA drives 2.5" or 3.5".

Useful for backup, querying SMART stats for a drive, etc.