I still remember the days (almost 10 years ago) when SATA drives hit the storage market by a storm and it became a much cheaper replacement to Fiber Channel drives which were the defacto choice for enterprise storage at that time.  In short few years, SATA drive has became a very desirable option in enterprise storage when capacity rather than performance is the focus.

I remember having the discussion over the years with many IT Admins about when Tape will be obsolete as result of storage prices going cheaper by day. Larger and larger SATA drives with lower price tags have been hitting the market over the year, which has  only spurred more of these discussions. Nonetheless 10 years later Tape Drives are still the main backup medium today at large enterprises.…

If you have decided to use StarWind Virtual Tape Library in an environment where you have Symantec Backup Exec and looking to find out how to integrate both products together then you have came to the right place. In fact if you have used or setup Symantec Backup Exec with ADIC Scalar 100 or HP MSL 2024 Tape library previously then you have went through the complete process before.

In this post, I will show you how to integrate your Symantec Backup Exec with StarWind Virtual Tape Library that is emulating HP MSL 2024. This post, assume you have already setup the StarWind Virtual Tape Library & drives. If you have not yet done so, then please start by going through my previous post: StarWind Virtual Tape Library.…

The StarWind iSCSI SAN has always been my lab primary SAN. It has never failed me, & I know of many companies who is quite happy with their StarWind iSCSI SAN and who refuse to move to a hardware box after seeing the benefits & how it fits their need. It has been amazing year this year as StarWind were kind enough to sponsor my blog. Though that is not all for StarWind this year. They have been nominated as finalist in multiple categories in the Storage Award 2012. Below are the categories they were nominated for & if you are a happy customer of their or welling to try their software and see if they deserve a vote, then the categories to vote for them are:

– Storage Virtualization Product of the Year

– Storage Magazine “One to Watch” Award.…

StarWind Software Inc., an innovative provider of SAN software for iSCSI storage and VM Backup technology, today announced the release of new StarWind iSCSI SAN v5.8 and Hyper-V Backup Plug-in. The iSCSI SAN software is enhanced by the powerful VM Backup technology that is included as a plug-in.

Backup plug-in is built specifically for Hyper-V-based environments to provide fast backup and restore for Hyper-V virtual machines. The backup solution delivered by StarWind performs all operations on the Hyper-V host level thus it requires no backup agents to be installed on virtual machines (Agentless Architecture).

Hyper-V Backup Plug-in makes fast backups and allows quick, reliable restore of both virtual machines and individual files. It utilizes advanced technologies for maximum disk space saving (Global Deduplication).…

If you have been following on VMware vSphere closely, then you would know that VMware VAAI(vStorage Api for Array Integration) is evolving to be more important on regular basis. VAAI, as you probably aware is a method VMware use to offload some tasks to the storage. The initial release was to offload three main functionality:

1- Full Copy: It was used to offload copying VMs to the storage to handle it rather than doing it in the software. This speed up VMs Deployment & so on.

2- Zero Blocks: which is used to zero-out disk regions

3- VMFS Assisted locking, so ESXi hosts will lock only a block rather than the full store as originally was the case before introducing VAAI when any file operation was done.…

When Building Virtual lab for vSphere, Hyper-V,  or any clustering solution the shared storage has always been an interesting part of the solution. Left Hand virtual storage appliance has always been a good easy to use option. After HP taking over lefthand, they have changed the product name to HP Storage P4000 Virtual Storage Appliance. Here I will show how to download & install the HP Storage P4000 Virtual Storage Appliance on ESXi host.

Before getting you to watch the video of how to install the HP Storage P4000 Virtual Storage Appliance on vSphere 5 and then connect it to the vSphere servers to build a vSphere cluster, its important to note that HP Storage P4000 Virtual Storage Appliance is not only suitable for lab environment but for small productions environment.…

I have today  just passed my IBM 000-206 High-End Disk Solutions for Open Systems Version 1. I thought I will post out my tips for what to study to help others pass the exam as well.

1- Make sure you know when to use DS8000, DS6000, DS4000, Nseries & SVC. There are so many scenario questions that will require you to be able to distinguish between the usage of each of the above storage types.

2- Make sure you are aware of the different versions of IBM TotalStorage Productivity Center, when to use which version, & what its used for.

3- Make sure you know the IBM DS8000 in and out. Make sure you know when to use DS8100 & when do you need DS8300.…

Today, you will learn how to install IBM Tivoli Storage Manager Server. You have two methods of getting the installation steps. Just watching the small video below after each section, or read the article below. Ah should I make this video training to be a paid one!!! Should it cost $$$$? Just a thought. As I am not paid to put this online & really its more of a time constrain, I was not able to add voice to these video or re-edit the videos & did not want to drag this tutorial further till I add voice to them. If you want to donate some of your time to do this, I can provide the video source.

Note: unfortunately I did not have the original media of the IBM TSM 5.5 at the time I was writing this tutorial so I have downloaded the installers from the IBM website & put them in a folder called TSM_Images on my E drive.…

If you have a boot from SAN server, you will be able to easily clone it for a backup or deployment purpose using the native DS8000 FlashCopy. As mentioned earlier FlashCopy is an optional feature for the DS8000, which means it will require an additional license to enable. The SAN administrator can initiate a FlashCopy of Boot from SAN Disk using the DS8000 Storage Manager GUI or using the DSCLI.

Creating a FlashCopy on the DS8000 can be as easy as running the following command on DS8000 DSCLI, where 6100 is the source LUN & 6101 is the target LUN.

mkflash -seqnum 01 6100:6101

After creating a FlashCopy of a certain LUN in case you need to restore the server to its original state all you have to do is shutdown the server (shutdown will be required if it’s the boot LUN only) & Map the FlashCopy Target LUN in the place of the FlashCopy Source LUN.…

The minimum IBM TotalStorage support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy and Virtual Disk Service (VDS) supported by IBM Tivoli Flash Copy Manager is Version 4.0.1. You can obtain the latest IBM DS8000 VDS form IBM Website at:

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=ssg1S4000372&rs=1113

IBM DS8000 VDS is required in order for IBM Tivoli FCM to be able to utilize the DS8000 FlashCopy feature as a hardware provider for its shadow services. If you don’t install IBM DS8000 VDS, then IBM Tivoli FCM will use the default Windows System Provider which has many limitations. The steps below illustrate the steps required to install IBM DS8000 VDS on Windows 2003 SP2.

1- If you plan on using the IBM TotalStorage Support for Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service with dynamic volumes,  please contact Microsoft and obtain hotfix 949391, 940349, & 932532.…