In addition to that type of situation, there are days when others just have that kind of day, when there is nothing notable going on, or the next thing to do is wait… and wait… and wait.

What does that have to do with community?

More than you might think.  Communities are great ways to learn, and to teach others a skill you might have to others looking for help.  In the case of the example above, it is a productive way to fill time that might be otherwise spent doing a whole lot of nothing.

While filling slow times is not the point of this post, I thought it a good way to start things off.  Think of it as a way to get the wheels turning about communities.

So if this blog generally covers technology, what’s up with community?

I could have posted this elsewhere for sure, but community is one of the biggest pieces of the technology industry so it seemed like a good fit. User Groups, networking events, and social media are great ways to interact with others.

Having an outlet to ask questions is what makes community so great in the technology space.  Especially since there are so many communities focussed on piles of different technologies.  These sub-communities can be extremely helpful when trying to learn about a particular technology.

But just getting help doesn’t

If you choose to participate in a community, by asking questions and working with others for help, make sure you take some time to share what you know within that community.  Sharing information is definitely what the whole thing is all about.

Get out there and see what communities are in your area, whether it is a technical community or a gardening community, there are loads of people with interests similar to yours who are looking to interact.  And that is good for all of us.

During the last week of April I was able to attend Storage Field Day 1 in San Jose and Drobo was one of the sponsoring companies for the event.  Since I spoke with them just before heading out there and it was great to meet the people that came up with their products.

SMB focused

Storage is typically a large vendor game, companies like EMC, Dell, and HP are focused on big iron and big storage budgets for big companies.  Sure they all have products that can fit in at a small shop (we use an EMC Celerra at my company today) but it seems these are more of an opportunity customer for most storage vendors.

When I first heard about Drobo, the size of the devices and amount of storage available led me to believe that Drobo was not headed toward big enterprise, which is completely acceptable given the products they were offering at the time (and still sell today).

By adding some secret sauce to RAID technology, storage across multiple disks was made automatic enough to be a serious contender for the IT shop with one or two people doing everything from E-mail management and desktop support to storage.  It also works well in the pro-sumer market for photographers and writers (or geeks who seem to keep data for extremely long periods of time).

To RAID and Beyond

Making storage an automatic task that isn’t managed is done through software.  The brains of the outfit allows the user to use different sized hard disks within the array and figures out how much of those disks is needed to ensure survivability.  In a normal RAID 5 situation, the disks in a raid group, disk pool, spinning media social club, or whatever the phrase of the day is, should be the same size – see my post about what happens when they aren’t.  Drobo doesn’t get weird if you use different sizes of disks, it just figures out how much disk to keep to itself and goes on about its business.

In traditional RAID there are many layers of complexity and choices about how many disk failures can be survived (depending on the number of disks you have overall and the RAID level chosen).  While that is well and good, it is not necessarily an easy thing to decipher.  BeyondRAID can be configured for a single disk failure or a dual disk failure.  When you select which you wish to use, Drobo does the thinking and hard work behind the scenes.

Note: You need to have enough drives to survive a failure, but that is all the work needed on the front end.

If I am going to have survivability, will I lose disks for this?

RAID, depending on configuration, allows drive failure to occur without losing data or forcing huge downtime.  This is a function of having many disks behave as one and some of the math that happens to allow for these behaviors.  Some disk arrays allow you to designate drives as hot-spares so that on a drive failure, the spare just dives in and takes over.  When the failed disk is replaced, the new disk becomes the spare.

Drobo doesn’t do that, or at least not that way.  To keep up with the Joneses, a virtual disk is created that acts like the hot spare.  Using storage from the entire pool of disks that adds up to one entire disk.  This way, all of the drives you add to the device are used so no drive is left waiting for something to do, but the concept of a hot-spare still exists.

Small business customers may not have the resources to spend all day managing their storage (I know that I don’t) so Drobo has done some things with BeyondRAID to aid in this management as well. For example, all storage arrays have lights on them that change color if things are different, so the administrator can see quickly when something is not quite up to par, and Drobo does this too, but not all arrays care about where the data is placed on the disk.  Many assume blocks are blocks and fling data onto LUNs wherever there are enough blocks to hold whatever is being written.

Drobo does the small business admin a favor by checking out the information as it is being written to the disk and finding the best place to store that data to keep up with optimal performance.

There are many other cool things happening BeyondRAID, and I will be looking in more detail at all the “software stuff” in a future post.

What about big data?

All companies would love to serve customers that are huge with seemingly unlimited budgets to buy their products, and there are Drobo units to do just that, one of which I will be looking at soon over on TechRepublic, but from what I saw at Storage Field Day 1, there is no intention of leaving their customers behind in a push to bigger things.

They will bring the big customers along for the ride that it seems the SMB customers have been enjoying for some time.

My thoughts on Drobo

I was excited to learn more about Drobo both from a product and technical standpoint and from a company view.  Focusing first on the SMB market and finding success there has certainly seemed to work out for them.  I am looking forward to getting a chance to check out their bigger offering very soon.

Disclaimer: I was asked by TechRepublic to review a product for Drobo which they are shipping to me as an evaluation.  In addition, Drobo is also sending me one of their products to use at home.  As a participating sponsor in the latest Tech Field Day event, Drobo helped foot the bill for my travel and expenses to attend. They have not received any consideration for this post.

Our storage has been growing steadily since we put in place about two years ago. To save money on the initial product, the disks chosen were 300Gb SAS connected disks. Which got us moving in the right direction.

Not long after the initial configuration, another tray of disks was added. This time they were 600Gb SAS. This was great, we were able to add more VMware guests and begin moving more workloads into the virtualization environment to reduce the footprint of our compute environment. One thing I have learned is that storage is a growth only proposition. Once you commission it and begin to grow into it, getting disk space back is much like trying to take a toy away from a toddler. It can be done, but sometimes it is easier not to.

Note: To all of the parents out there, I am not trying to say that taking toys away isn’t needed sometimes, maybe this is more inline with returning the toy rather than simply taking it away.

As the VM environment continued to grow, the available storage was consumed quickly and a good portion of our production resources were running on networked storage. The overall experience has been pretty positive and this was definitely the right choice.

We decided to add another shelf of 600Gb SAS disks and surprisingly, got them without much lead time given the developments in Thailand recently. This is when the fun got started.

I got the shelf added to the storage array and powered it on with no problems. All that was left was to add the disks in the shelf to the Disk Pools on the Celerra.

Adding shelves to existing pools…
Because I wasn’t doing anything considerably fancy with the new disks, I added them to one of the existing storage pools rather than creating a new pool on the array. My thought was this would be something that was faster and would get the storage online in a hurry.

The new disks did come online in a hurry (relatively speaking). They came up with no errors, but the existing disk pool I used is configured for RAID 5. It also contains the 300Gb SAS disks of the original configuretion.

Not an issue, but an issue all at once
Because of the way RAID works, the disks should all be of the same size to avoid the issue of “smallest bucket” or least common denominator.

I knew this going in, but apparently this is something that does not function on Friday afternoons. My analogy is to use ice cream buckets. For example, If I have one half gallon pail (300GB SAS) and two one gallon pails (600GB SAS) the most water I can hold across the three buckets is 1/2 gallon to avoid spilling water. This is because the smallest unit wins.

I am working on getting larger disks to replace the smaller disks as they become available and will likely get another enclosure for the smaller disks and add them (formatted of course) to a separate disk pool to make use of the space.

What is the lesson?
There are several takeaways here, the biggest one for me is to remember the basics of the technology you are working with. This would have saved considerable troubleshooting. In this case, the storage worked and is still useable until it gets worked out, but I am missing half of the tray because of the smaller disks being in the same raid group.

I guess also ensuring that you do not hastily configure your storage because it is not a difficult task is another.

I know that this seems like a trivial question, but I am really not sure which is the best way to handle such things.  On the one hand, recording during the screen cast gets the whole thing done and out of the way, on the other recording after the fact allows me to focus on the task at hand rather than worrying about what to say when.  I am typically a written documentation type of person, where providing the steps is the best solution, but I know that not everyone learns that way and the tools are everywhere to prepare any kind of training or documentation needed to suit a situation.

What is your preference for screencasting, to record the audio as you go or tack it on after?  Please leave your thoughts in the comments, the feedback will be quite helpful

If you have Microsoft SharePoint experience and want to share what you know with IT Professionals from the Appleton Wisconsin/Fox Valley area, please check it out.

What is Tech on Tap?

It is a series of sessions covering a wide range of technologies, usually at the 200-300 level. The sessions take place in brewpubs in Northeast Wisconsin on Saturdays. Lunch, beer, and networking are provided. The idea being that some IT professionals do not get opportunities to go see vendors or experts, so we thought that someone should bring these events to the local IT Pro. There are more details over at www.techontap.org

What happened to Windows 7?

Nothing.  Windows 7 is alive and kicking.  However letting Windows developers get bored is not a good idea either, so Windows “8″ was a project that has likely been going on for quite some time.  The first bits released were the Developer Preview, and now the CTP.

Having played with both for a short amount of time, the beta version feels more polished and much more complete than the Dev Preview.

Is there a Start Button?

Nope. The start button has seemingly gone the way of the dodo bird (or Windows Vista, whichever) but I do not think it is too big a problem.  The new method of accessing your stuff, using the charms bar a collection of things that slides in from off screen.

I think this is a good change, since the hope is that tablets everywhere will be able to use this release it needs to feel good there as well as on a PC.

What is new?

A better question might be what isnt new.  There are tons of new features coming to Windows “8″ including some that land close to a few of my favorite areas:

Storage Spaces – this feature is a storage aggregator.  It can collect unused raw disks from your environment by querying computers you specify.  Then it allows you to create a pool on those disks and volumes from within those pools to present to Windows.  This means that overall, storage is likely to come down in cost for small business because any old disks will do.

ReFS – this is the new file system for Windows “8″.  For now it is for data volumes only, but Microsoft hopes that it will become what NTFS has been for the last many years and more.

On a file share – normally, in previous versions of Windows, the last place you would find critical application files for things like SQL server is at the end of a path like \\server\awesomedatabase but that seems to be something the upcoming release gets… and can do very well.  The application makes calls and opens handles to the SMB2.2 (which is not CIFS) share which handles the database application.  Somehow Microsoft must have fooled SQL Server into being OK with this as it seems to just work.

There are lots of other cool things in the recent preview and beta builds of Windows Client and Server, more than I can go through here (and certainly there are things to uncover as I play around more).  Next up… making the Macbook Pro a true Windows Machine.  Hopefully if the backup goes well, tomorrow we boot Windows.

I am anxious to get my hands on this file system and play with the features that it will bring to the table.  I do have the Windows 8 preview and will get into it further soon, but from what I have read and previous discussions with Microsoft this seems very very interesting.

Things I like so far:

Live.  Microsoft is working to engineer ReFS to handle corruption and corrections live, without the need to offline the file system.  This will reduce the time needed to maintain the filesystem.

Better data integrity as a whole.  Because the file system can manage and mitigate corrupt files and handle much of the repair process online, there will be less need to reboot to take care of maintenance tasks, like following check disk runs.

Checksums on metadata.  Being able to ensure a file integrity has not been compromised at will without a process run by the user is great.

Shared Storage Pooling.  This will allow storage across servers to be pooled and shared amongst them creating a load balanced configuration to allow for better resource an file availability.

I cannot say that I am surprised these changes are coming and this makes up for the Metro UI a bit for me, but I do want to see more of that is planned for ReFS and get my hands on it a bit more.  One of these days I will get another Windows laptop and get Windows 8 running on it to get a closer look at the file system and its tools.

For more information on ReFS check out these links:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hardware/microsofts-killer-windows-server-8-feature-refs/17757

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/microsoft-goes-public-with-plans-for-its-new-windows-8-file-system/11666

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/01/16/building-the-next-generation-file-system-for-windows-refs.aspx

I am not sure if the knowledge, and technical learning or the people and networking I get the opportunity to do is the best part.  I will admit, the technical things I liked the most were the ones I knew the least about going in.  My organization is small, and we have bigger storage than we did even two years ago, but some of the storage I have been learning about lately is definitely in the Big Enterprise category.

3PAR

I knew 3PAR was a service provider focussed storage company that HP acquired.  That is about it.  I think I also knew they used yellow bezels.  Some of the programming and data handling software that 3PAR is using to efficiently handle data is amazing.  A good amount of the decisions made (once the user decides where the data should be placed) are handled on the backend in the array.

Once the offload happens, 3PAR has a set of algorithms and software called ASIC that get to work on the commands passed in by an admin.  The compute work is also handled in storage and the whole thing is very fast.  The hands on lab was a great experience, allowing me to play with a 3PAR array, something I will likely not get to do in the real world.

It would be cool if HP could make some of these labs available via the web to allow further learning by us geeks who just have a desire to know as much as we can hold about storage.

I know that I havent covered everything we saw from 3PAR, but for me the ASIC discussion and the efficiency of the system were definitely the highlights.

Virtual System

I have always wanted a kick ass pile of compute in a box.  You know, the kind that falls from the sky and plugs in, bringing you an enterprise quality system.  HP is doing this on medium, large, and huge scale.  They sell certain levels of virtual system which brings compute, management compute, networking, and storage into one or more interconnected rack enclosures.  The customer works with HP and chooses the options they want, and the racks appear  (plus shipping of course). Even though the systems can be high to start, it is a ground up, quick way to take the mess out of a datacenter and get a clean, fast, product that just works.

Networking

The networking opportunity that came from this event, with both other bloggers (some of whom I had met before and some new faces) and HP employees was incredible.  I know that I will be reaching out to a few of the HP-ers to learn more about some of these products and to the other bloggers to help my network and general knowledge of storage technology grow.  I am amazed how much I have learned over the past few years both from attending events and meeting people.

Next up.

Once I get back to Wisconsin (boarding the plane in just under 2 hours) I will be knee deep in Tech On Tap.  That kicks off tomorrow and really is a similar event in style to what I have been doing this week.  On a smaller scale, since we selected a technology and found some smart people to come in and help us talk about it. As much as I am tired at the moment, I cant wait to see what tomorrow brings.

I know that I will also be chasing down a good digital recorder before I goto another event like this.  It is really hard to keep up sometimes and maybe getting notes that way and sculpting them into useful stuff after that is the way to do it.  I missed a good chunk of a virtualization integration session while fielding a couple of support calls, nobodys fault, but a good opportunity to record and review later.  The portions of the session I did catch were interesting to say the least.  I have a lot to learn about virtualization.

Thank you

I want to thank HP (@HPStorageguy and @beccataylor) for putting this event together and all the other HP-ers and bloggers who participated and helped me learn something new.

So I started getting acquainted with Exchange 2010 in a VM today.  Prepping AD and Running setup to see where that might leave me.  Since it knows about my existing Exchange 2003 organization and detects it without much help I think this really might be pretty decent.  

I feel a bit like a geek rockstar, having a full mail server all to myself, but once all the configuration and testing are done others will be moved there too.  Then, the old hardware we use for mail, a pix firewall, and various other prehistoric gear can come out.

Doing that might make our Internet experience less bumpy, goto meeting might work all the time, and dare I say, we can go cloud.  So far the cloud looks good, but no way until the bandwidth is reliable.  I’m interested to see how quickly this happens once things get moving.

In a couple weeks I’m off to Fort Collins Co. to see some HP storage technology and some friends, then it’s right back here for Tech on Tap : Virtualization on Saturday 1/28. I am still not sure we really managed to get it all done, but it seems to be coming together nicely. If you are still wondering what Tech on Tap is all about, check out the link and sign up, there are a few seats left that need filling for this event.

After the first ToT event there is something new coming for me in February with SolarWinds thwack community. I will be providing some blog posts to get the discussion moving about storage. The posts aren’t for products, just to build conversation. The gig is paid (full disclosure) and my opinions are my own. I am excited for the opportunity and can’t wait to get started… Now where did those notes and ideas go?

Next up, Microsoft’s MVP summit, or geek camp as my wife refers to it.  I am hoping to learn more about Windows 8 and plans for file system dedupe.  Should be an informative week.  Hopefully lots of ideas land on my plate to consider and expand on, then when those that might be under NDA can be disclosed I’m all set.  I know there will be things ready for prime time right away and that’s cool too. Between all these things there is writing for TechRepublic and Redmond Magazine, planning more Tech on Tap events and maybe some work for Pearson Education too.

Oh and as of yesterday, I got Exchange 2010 running. Now to get the pieces in place for the iPhone and other users, then the network cleanup can begin, progress, and be completed.

2012 looks to be the best year yet, and I can’t wait to see how this year shakes out. Thanks to all the friends I have made over the past few years for all the help, support, and opportunities (learning and other). I am often surprised by them. Here’s to great content in 2012!