Western Digital Corp.launches first helium drive

HGST Inc., a subsidiary of Western Digital Corp., today launched its first helium-filled hard disk drive, the 6 TB Ultrastar He6.

The new drives consist of disk platters sealed inside a hermetic chamber filled with heliuminstead of air. The breakthrough storage technology allows manufacturers to increase capacity by stacking more disk platters inside a 3.5-inch form factor while significantly reducing power consumption.

The HGST Ultrastar He6 helium drive contains seven disk platters in a 1 inch-high drive. Current standard air-filled disk drives contain five platters and a maximum of 4 TB. Helium is one-seventh the density of air, so there is less turbulence caused by disk and heads that move to read and write data. HGST claims helium drives will reduce power consumption on average by 23%.

http://searchstorage.techtarget.com/news/2240208458/HGST-Inc-launches-first-helium-drive

NetApp Efficient IT Calculator

10 Exabyte Storage System

Cleversafe, a cloud storage software vendor which offers its customers "limitless storage space", says that it has designed a dispersed storage system that exceeds a storage capability of 10 Exabytes (EB), or 1,000 Petabytes (PB).

Zoom

The system is based on Cleversafe's Portable Datacenter (PD), which integrates 21 storage and network racks that include 189 storage nodes of 45 x 3 TB drives to offer a total storage capacity of 25,515 TB. The current configuration also includes 35 PDs per site (893,025 TB) and 16 sites total (14,288,400 TB with more than 4.7 million drives total). In total, Cleversafe offers about 13.6 EB of storage.

What could you do with so much storage? The best application scenario today may be data mining. Large scale data mining. “Internet traffic volumes are increasing at a rate of 32 percent globally each year. It’s not unrealistic to think companies looking to mine that data would need to effectively analyze 80 EBs of data per month by 2015,” said Russ Kennedy vice president of Product Strategy, Marketing and Customer Solutions for Cleversafe. Kennedy noted that the company's storage solution is a "foundational enabler to Big Data analytics.” The object-based storage could especially be useful in large-data applicatiosn leveraged by governments and defense agencies.

However, Cleversafe noted that the creation of the Exabyte storage model was a result of Federal government and a telecommunications provider inquiring what it would take to achieve a 10 Exabyte storage system. Kennedy noted that, because of these inquiries, the company knows that there is "definitely interest" in such a product.

NetApp - Automated Storage Tiering

NetApp has put a lot of time and energy into understanding the problems that AST must address in order to architect an optimal solution.

This article describes:

• Criteria for evaluating AST technologies
• Migration-based versus caching-based AST approaches
• The NetApp® Virtual Storage Tier—a caching-based approach to AST

http://www.netapp.com/us/communities/tech-ontap/tot-ast-virtual-storage-tier-1104.html

Market Share Analysis: Network-Attached Storage/Unified Storage, Worldwide, 2011

• EMC overtook NetApp in 2011 as the No. 1 vendor in terms of overall vendor-branded revenue for network-attached storage (NAS) and unified storage through internal growth (VNX/VNXe and Data Domain) and acquisition (Isilon).
• NetApp's Data Ontap maintains its No. 1 ranking for NAS/unified storage in terms of technology platform.
• The estimated "pure NAS" market (excluding the block storage portion of the unified storage market) grew 21.5% in vendor revenue in 2011, much faster than block-based storage arrays because of the NAS support of growing vertical applications and virtualization.
• The NAS market has become increasingly consolidated with innovative products and vendors acquired by top-tier storage vendors in the past two years.

http://www.gartner.com/technology/reprints.do?id=1-1AIHCBH&ct=120515&st=sb

NetApp System Manager 2.0 Public Beta

System Manager 2.0 enables you to manage multiple storage systems and storage elements such as disks, volumes, and aggregates. It provides a Web-based graphical management interface to manage common storage system functions from a Web browser.

You can perform tasks such as:

- Configure and manage storage elements such as disks, aggregates, volumes, LUNs, qtrees, and quotas.
- Configure protocols such as CIFS and NFS and provision file sharing.
- Configure protocols such as FC and iSCSI for block access.
- Create vFiler units and manage them.- Set up SnapMirror relationships and manage SnapMirror tasks.- Manage HA configurations and perform takeover and giveback.
- Monitor and manage your storage systems.

Note: The Public Beta program is open to all existing NetApp customers. The Beta version of NetApp System Manager 2.0 software has to be installed only on non-production environments. Beta has a limited support on NetApp communities only.

http://communities.netapp.com/groups/netapp-system-manager-20-public-beta

NetApp System Manager 2.0 Tutorials
http://communities.netapp.com/docs/DOC-10703

Disk drive in BYP (disk bypass) status

What are Drive Bypass Events?

fcal link_stats report BYP status.

Example:
localhost> fcstat device_map
Loop Map for channel 4a:
Translated Map: Port Count 28
7 29 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 45 44
43 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32
Shelf mapping:
Shelf 1: 29 BYP 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16
Shelf 2: 45 44 43 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32

This means that the disk id 28 has been bypassed.

Drive bypass events are situations which cause the ESH to bypass a drive port thus making it inaccessible by the host and isolating the drive from the loop. There are primarily two different kinds of drive Bypass Events:
Threshold Bypasses - Situations where the ESH detects that a certain kind of error is occurring for a specific period of time and the determination is made to bypass the port because of accumulated errors over time or over the amount of data flowing through the loop.
Policy Bypasses - Situations where the ESH detects a critical problem and bypasses a drive in order to maintain the integrity of the loop. This might be a "situational" problem which later clears, but once a drive is bypassed, it will remain bypassed until manually cleared by removing and reseating the drive, or by power cycling of the shelf.
Self Bypasses - The hard drive electronics determine that the internal circuitry cannot function properly anymore. Thus the drive itself calls to be removed from the loop.

EMC VNX/ Isilon Spec Sheet

VNXe series -- http://www.emc.com/products/series/vnxe-series.htm#/1

VNX series -- http://www.emc.com/products/series/vnx-series.htm#/1

VNX Gateway -- http://www.emc.com/products/series/vnx-series-gateways.htm#/1

Isilon S-series -- http://www.isilon.com/s-series

Isilon X-series -- http://www.isilon.com/x-series

Isilon NL-series -- http://www.isilon.com/nl-series

General Availability of Data ONTAP 8.0.1 7-Mode

Supported Platforms

Data ONTAP 8.0.1 7-Mode GA release is supported on the following platforms:

FAS/V62x0

FAS/V60x0

FAS/V32x0

FAS/V31x0

FAS/V3070

FAS/V3040

FAS2040

SA series

https://now.netapp.com/NOW/products/cpc/cpc1101-04.shtml
 

NetApp - Changing Gateway Settings

1. SSH to controller 1.
2. Type 'rdfile /etc/rc'
3. Copy the contents of the /etc/rc output to notepad. (Might want to save this to a file for safe keeping)
   1. Example
        1.hostname bob
           ifconfig e0a `hostname`-e0a mediatype auto flowcontrol full netmask 255.255.255.0 partner e0a
           ifconfig e0b `hostname`-e0b mediatype auto flowcontrol full partner e0b
           ifconfig e0c `hostname`-e0c mediatype auto flowcontrol full partner e0c
           route add default 1.1.1.1 1
           routed on
           options dns.domainname bob.local
           options dns.enable on
           options nis.enable off
           savecore
 
4. Change the notepad contents for the default route statement.
     1. Example
            1.hostname bob
           ifconfig e0a `hostname`-e0a mediatype auto flowcontrol full netmask 255.255.255.0 partner e0a
           ifconfig e0b `hostname`-e0b mediatype auto flowcontrol full partner e0b
           ifconfig e0c `hostname`-e0c mediatype auto flowcontrol full partner e0c
           route add default 2.2.2.2 1
           routed on
           options dns.domainname bob.local
           options dns.enable on
           options nis.enable off
           savecore
5. Make sure you get this right or your system won't boot. Copy the contents of the modified file to your clipboard.
6. In the SSH session type 'wrfile /etc/rc'
7. Paste the contents of your buffer into the SSH session.
8. Press Ctrl+C to quit the editor.
9. Verify, type 'rdfile /etc/rc' and make sure there are no extra line breaks or truncations.
10. Type 'route delete default'
11. Type 'route add default 2.2.2.2 1'
12. SSH to controller 2.
13. Repeat steps abvove