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Published: Tuesday, 27 March 2018 08:30
Fujitsu's StorageCluster feature is a very interesting piece of technology. Not only because it offer synchronous mirroring with transparent failover in a native way without the need for additional software like DataCore's SANsymphony, IBMs SVC or FalconStors NSS but rather because it is very versatile. You can mirror between every ETERNUS DX system as long as it is generation S3 or higher and runs firmware V10L20 or higher. For example, you can mirror between a DX100 S4 on the first site and a DX600 S3 on the second site. This is possible because all ETERNUS DX systems share the same firmware and only the hardware it runs on is more ore less powerful. This is a real hardware invest protection. The second very interesting feature is the lack of capcity based licensing. Synchronous mirroring (Fujitsu calls it StorageCluster) is licensed on system level, so once you bought the license it doesn't matter how much storage you put into your system. This is a very important fact in times where capacity grows more and more.
Although the StorageCluster is a nice feature especially in the DACH or EMEA region (we love synchronous mirroring) there is pretty few information about it on the internet. If you ever think about implementing this feature you shouldn't rely on community posts, blog articles or even a documentation from Fujitsu themselfes. Don't ask me why but there is not even an official documentation for this feature on the web as far as I know. You can find some information about SC in some whitepapers and some presentations but a dedicated walkthrough paper you probably won't find. Perhaps the reason is because the product is not that popular and Fujitsu is definetly not that common as systems from HPE or Dell/EMC but I'm pretty sure that is is not because the products are bad. Absolutely not, FTS's storage products are very stable, perhaps not that feature rich, but absolutely reliable, easy to setup and maintain (most of them :-) ) and very flexible.
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Published: Thursday, 22 March 2018 12:14
Hi everybody, I just want to inform the internet that v-strange.de will be back in business in the next few days.
I do this blog mainly in my free time and the last few years my family had absolute priority so please forgive me neglecting my blog in this time. As kids grew up the free time will hopefully a bit more and I have more time to do writing down my experience with new technologies and describe problems I stumbled across. I got great feedback during the first years of this blog and I'm convinced that my information provided help to a significant amount of readers so I'm very motivated to publish new articles.
In the meantime my focus changed a bit, so DataProtector for example isn't a focus anymore. Don't get me wrong, DP is still a good product for special cases but for the majority of customers, DP is too "old-school" and complicated in comparision to products like Veeam. Most of my customers changed to Veeam with only three customers still using DP. This is a significant reduction and because of this, I will probably drop DP from my blog. If you are still interested in news about DP send me a comment.
Simplivity and CloudByte will also be dropped. Simplivity just because there are solutions on the market that are nearly as good as Simplivity but much cheaper and more flexible and I want focus on open and flexible solutions like VMware vSAN, Microsoft Storage Spaces Direct or DataCore's HCI solution.
CloudByte was a newcomer on the market and we got great expectations on this technology as it could become a real alternative to NAS systems like the ones from NetApp or to be an opponent to disk based backup solutions like EMCs DataDomain or HPEs StoreOnce. Unfortunately it felt short on our expectations and especially in the dedup area and usage as a backup appliance it was way behind our requirements. So still it will have some use cases but not that much to be a focus technology for me or my company.
One more key focus will be introduced on this blog: Fujitsu server and storage systems. As a former HPE-only company we spent a lot of time implementing HPE systems at customer site not looking left and right for other vendors. As HPEs strategy regarding partners and product portfolio went a bit confusing, we started to give another player a chance. That was Fujitsu and we are really pleased with them in the meanwhile. Very good product portfolio (not that big as HPE but more streamlined and continuously and "designed and made by FTS" (in opposite to HPE that is continuously buying 3rd party companies)) and very good partner support. Both things are mandatory if you want to be successful in the on-prem market. Switching to new technology and vendors is always a challenge but FTS supported us very well and today we have a strong knowledge in the main areas. Several successful projects are already implemented with new ones come in nearly every day.
To cut a long story short: v-strange.de is back in business! Have fun!
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Published: Thursday, 23 June 2016 16:03
A few days ago I was at a customer that uses Veeam to backup his vSphere environment. Nothing special in the configuration. We run this setup for a few years now and it was bulletproof.
Recently we upgraded to Veeam v9 and vSphere 6 to be on the latest major versions both vendors offer. Since then we have a strange problem that was overseen for a while.
The customers security requirements deny access for any system from the internal network to the DMZ, especially for the backup server. To have fully consistent backups of VMs running in the DMZ we use Veeam VAAIP agents uploaded to the VMs via VIX because RPC (admin share access via CIFS) is not allowed. This worked perfectly even with Veeam v9 and vSphere 6. Perfectly until the customer upgraded the VMware Tools on his DMZ VMs. The weeks before the problem arose the VMs ran on vSphere 6 but with VMware Tools from 5.5. The moment he upgraded to VMware Tools 10.x the VIX upload didn't work anymore. The problem only hits a few VMs that can not leverage RPC as alternative upload method.
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