Having experienced this several times makes me wonder are manufactures purposely making their newer drives incompatible with older drive arrays in hopes the customer would simply say, "Screw it..just buy a new drive enclosure and buncha drives with some spares"? That would leave a sour taste in my mouth if I ever have to go that route.
I was lucky to have older spares in storage that I was able to use before we upgraded them to EMC2 products. I left the company some time ago so don't know if maybe 5 years from now will they have the same issues with the EMC2?
I can certainly relate to that issue on the older Dell drive array sub-systems. It seems certain versions of the hard drives will only work in the disk array. So I had to call up Dell and specifically told them it has to be a Fujitsu drive with certain firmware for the array to properly initialize the drive.
Of course Dell sent us the wrong drive and it didn't work. Took a couple of re-tries for Dell to send us the right drive.
This is after we updated the firmware on the SCSI drive enclosure and PERC4 cards suggested by Dell.
Update the firmware my ass. Sheesh
Whatever happened to "If it aint broken..don't screw with it?"
Lucky their EMC2 products don't have this problem as I've replaced a couple of dozen Fibre Channel 300Gig drives of various brands and they all work just fine. Least they did something right.
I recently picked up the 2.5in Elite Series 500GB Western Digital portable hard drive from Costco when it was on sale and it's been running great so far.
Also, picked up a 1TB Seagate SATAII drive as my primary HD for the PC I am using now. I thought about the 1.5TB and then I remember all the problems people are having with them so I picked up the 1TB instead. The little price difference wasn't worth it to me.
I am too on salary and there are times I had to come in very early in the morning to fix some issues. I would say to my boss, "Since I came in 6am in the morning I would like to leave at 3pm..is that ok?" Most of the time no problem.
I do live near SF and ever so often I would take the BART there so wouldn't have to deal with the parking issues.
The previous poster is correct about the short light timing and I hadn't thought of it until now. The traffic flow in the city is actually pretty smooth with little traffic jams. Kinda like a short stop and go but it's continuous and people are actually very courteous and I do respect the pedestrians's right of way (despite the fact it is California law).
Pretty cool to actually start walking crossing a busy street and the cars actually stop for me to walk across. That is, of course, on a designated pedestrian crosswalk.
Sounds like it's running on a UPS and the battery's lifespan is about 3-5 years. I know server class machines have dual power supplies but for home users which isn't the norm.
I think www.crashplan.com is better option for me as I can use a buddy system. Basically what it means I can use my buddy's hard drive across the country to story my data free of charge. I just pay for the license of the software and I am free to do whatever I want.
Rsync snapshots to a USB drive. Maybe a couple of USB drives, one that you take home every week while the other stays plugged in, swap every Sunday after the service.
If your server is *nix I like rsnapshot, a wrapper script for hourly/daily/weekly/monthly snapshots - dead simple and painless.
If your server is Win32 I'm told rsync works on cygwin, never tried it myself.
It does and I have used it on a couple of occasions. Although I prefer using rsync between Linux boxes anyway. That is just me.
Tapes aren't very good when you want to go back to a previous date (that's why we have snapshots). But tapes are really good if you want a uncomplicated process (although time consuming) to reliably archive your data. (and I say this coming from three storage companies that wanted to just sell people a box full of harddrives to replace tape backup)
I don't think "confusing" with mirroring is his fault. I think it's pure laziness and the chief didn't bother to check on his own guy's work to make sure it's properly configured and running.
So in a nutshell laziness have no place in IT world given the fact there are plenty of both free and commercial tools that are easy to use.
What tools do you use to create a VM image of an active server? I currently use the VMWare Server 2.0 running in Linux that hosts other Linux and Windows Servers. Creating a new VM image is easy BUT not sure if I can actually create a snapshot of a real physical server that can be hosted under VMWare.
I wouldn't advise anybody messing around with the active RAID drives...PERIOD.
A simple database dump to an external hard drive for off-site backup would be far more ideal and cheap solution to do.
My first choice for any business always been tapes but sometimes they can't spend the money on it so I usually tell them then we need multiple portable external hard drives for off-site until the company can afford a tape backup solution.
Not too bad of an idea, least there is duplicate data at a different location which is better than what these guys are proposing.
Ideal thing is to have the duplicated data be MILES from the main DC site but it's not always practical when you have large volume of data to replicate and backup. Yes I know all about rysnc and smart data replication but still nothing like good old fashioned complete full backups at a expense of time. That always seems to work well for most people.
Just hope you're also dumping backed up data from the NAS to some kind of a removable media, i.e. tapes so it is physically separated from the servers into a vault of some kind.
Lightning can strike and wipe out your servers. Long as your data are kept elsewhere you can easily rebuild your systems from backup.
Slashdot Mirror
Having experienced this several times makes me wonder are manufactures purposely making their newer drives incompatible with older drive arrays in hopes the customer would simply say, "Screw it..just buy a new drive enclosure and buncha drives with some spares"? That would leave a sour taste in my mouth if I ever have to go that route.
I was lucky to have older spares in storage that I was able to use before we upgraded them to EMC2 products. I left the company some time ago so don't know if maybe 5 years from now will they have the same issues with the EMC2?
I recently bought the 1TB ST31000333AS version and it shows the firmware is SD35. Is the firmware also flawed?
I use it both in Linux and Windows. So far it seems to be running ok.
I can certainly relate to that issue on the older Dell drive array sub-systems. It seems certain versions of the hard drives will only work in the disk array. So I had to call up Dell and specifically told them it has to be a Fujitsu drive with certain firmware for the array to properly initialize the drive.
Of course Dell sent us the wrong drive and it didn't work. Took a couple of re-tries for Dell to send us the right drive.
This is after we updated the firmware on the SCSI drive enclosure and PERC4 cards suggested by Dell.
Update the firmware my ass. Sheesh
Whatever happened to "If it aint broken..don't screw with it?"
Lucky their EMC2 products don't have this problem as I've replaced a couple of dozen Fibre Channel 300Gig drives of various brands and they all work just fine. Least they did something right.
I recently picked up the 2.5in Elite Series 500GB Western Digital portable hard drive from Costco when it was on sale and it's been running great so far.
Also, picked up a 1TB Seagate SATAII drive as my primary HD for the PC I am using now. I thought about the 1.5TB and then I remember all the problems people are having with them so I picked up the 1TB instead. The little price difference wasn't worth it to me.
I am too on salary and there are times I had to come in very early in the morning to fix some issues. I would say to my boss, "Since I came in 6am in the morning I would like to leave at 3pm..is that ok?" Most of the time no problem.
So I'm cool with that.
Yes until the next windows updates that fuber things up again.
I do live near SF and ever so often I would take the BART there so wouldn't have to deal with the parking issues.
The previous poster is correct about the short light timing and I hadn't thought of it until now. The traffic flow in the city is actually pretty smooth with little traffic jams. Kinda like a short stop and go but it's continuous and people are actually very courteous and I do respect the pedestrians's right of way (despite the fact it is California law).
Pretty cool to actually start walking crossing a busy street and the cars actually stop for me to walk across. That is, of course, on a designated pedestrian crosswalk.
Alot of this will be moot point when majority of the cars can drive themselves according to best possible route.
The technology is getting there so maybe we'll see this happen in 10 years from now.
Meanwhile, we just have to put up with the morons on the road.
That's ok. Somebody with a dozen or so Sony PS3s clustered together to crack the Wii's 232bit encryption key so it'll be a matter of time.
You can run FreeBSD as a client in VMWare. Only caveat is VMWare can't run FreeBSD as a host so it's either Linux or Windows.
The irony of this to play around with FreeBSD without formatting one my servers I use VMWare which is being hosted on a Ubuntu server.
Yes it would be nice VMWare do support FreeBSD as a host but it's not an option at the moment.
Running solid for over 6 years?? Nice.
Sounds like it's running on a UPS and the battery's lifespan is about 3-5 years. I know server class machines have dual power supplies but for home users which isn't the norm.
For those who want FreeBSD firewall in a box can give PFSense 1.2.1 a try which is based on FreeBSD 7
www.pfsense.com
Amazon is getting to be a little greedy.
I think www.crashplan.com is better option for me as I can use a buddy system. Basically what it means I can use my buddy's hard drive across the country to story my data free of charge. I just pay for the license of the software and I am free to do whatever I want.
Rsync snapshots to a USB drive. Maybe a couple of USB drives, one that you take home every week while the other stays plugged in, swap every Sunday after the service.
If your server is *nix I like rsnapshot, a wrapper script for hourly/daily/weekly/monthly snapshots - dead simple and painless.
If your server is Win32 I'm told rsync works on cygwin, never tried it myself.
It does and I have used it on a couple of occasions. Although I prefer using rsync between Linux boxes anyway. That is just me.
Tapes aren't very good when you want to go back to a previous date (that's why we have snapshots). But tapes are really good if you want a uncomplicated process (although time consuming) to reliably archive your data. (and I say this coming from three storage companies that wanted to just sell people a box full of harddrives to replace tape backup)
Let me guess... folks from Dell?
Very sound system you have in place. Keep using it.
They will thank you for it and keep your job.
Yep, mirroring even mirrors disasters and screw ups as some people found out.
I think when people hear "RAID" it's protected. What they don't realize RAID is for HARDWARE protection not software. DUH!!!
Ah well, it's a shame a company is now out of business as they can't recover ANY of the lost data.
Infected with some kind of a trojan?
Very nice catch but doesn't really help to bring the site backup (pardon the pun).
At least the bloggers can recover much as they can before it disappear forever in digital heaven.
I don't think "confusing" with mirroring is his fault. I think it's pure laziness and the chief didn't bother to check on his own guy's work to make sure it's properly configured and running.
So in a nutshell laziness have no place in IT world given the fact there are plenty of both free and commercial tools that are easy to use.
What tools do you use to create a VM image of an active server? I currently use the VMWare Server 2.0 running in Linux that hosts other Linux and Windows Servers. Creating a new VM image is easy BUT not sure if I can actually create a snapshot of a real physical server that can be hosted under VMWare.
Appreciate any insights you have.
A good IT guy convinces the bosses that the company NEEDS a good backup solution, not just on RAID.
I wouldn't advise anybody messing around with the active RAID drives...PERIOD.
A simple database dump to an external hard drive for off-site backup would be far more ideal and cheap solution to do.
My first choice for any business always been tapes but sometimes they can't spend the money on it so I usually tell them then we need multiple portable external hard drives for off-site until the company can afford a tape backup solution.
Not too bad of an idea, least there is duplicate data at a different location which is better than what these guys are proposing.
Ideal thing is to have the duplicated data be MILES from the main DC site but it's not always practical when you have large volume of data to replicate and backup. Yes I know all about rysnc and smart data replication but still nothing like good old fashioned complete full backups at a expense of time. That always seems to work well for most people.
Just hope you're also dumping backed up data from the NAS to some kind of a removable media, i.e. tapes so it is physically separated from the servers into a vault of some kind.
Lightning can strike and wipe out your servers. Long as your data are kept elsewhere you can easily rebuild your systems from backup.