How to start copy to hotspare manually

Posted by on November 11, 2014 5 comments
Hard Drive

I recently had to manually invoke a hot spare in a VNX 5200, but in Unisphere the option was greyed out.

Unisphere_No-CopyToHotSpare

On the CLI the command wasn’t supported. Now what?

CopyToHotSpare_fail

According to https://support.emc.com/kb/184890 the proper command is now

naviseccli -h [ip of one SP] copytodisk [source-disk] [hot spare]

CopyToDisk_Success

Using the “getdisk” command will show you the actual rebuild has started.

Bare in mind that the way to address disks is in the format “Bus_Enclosure_Disk”, so for example 1_2_3 means disk 3 (the 4th disk) in enclosure 2 on bus 1.

In Unisphere you can actually see the progress of the rebuild:

Disk Rebuild in Unisphere

The Science of ‘Interstellar’ Explained

Posted by on November 8, 2014 1 comment

Warning: SPOILER ALERT! This infographic contains details about the new space film “Interstellar.”

The film “Interstellar” relies on real science for many of its stunning visuals. Physicist Kip Thorne, an expert on black holes and wormholes, provided the math that the special effects artists turned into movie magic.

The spaceship Endurance’s destination is Gargantua, a fictional supermassive black hole with a mass 100 million times that of the sun. It lies 10 billion light-years from Earth and is orbited by several planets. Gargantua rotates at an astounding 99.8 percent of the speed of light.

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The endless discussion about binary versus decimal prefixes – GB vs GiB

Posted by on September 30, 2014 No comments

I already wrote about this twice:

  1. My first blog post about the issue
  2. My second blog post

And to fire up the discussion once again, I found another link on the IEC website: http://www.iec.ch/si/binary.htm

Remember that scientists want to be very precise about their findings and writing G, means there’s 1,000,000,000 of whatever they were measuring. If they wanted to switch to counting in binary language, they would either switch to using 0s and 1s or use binary prefixes like Gi, Mi, Pi and Ki.

So once again:

  • 1 kB = 1,000 Bytes
  • 1 KiB = 1,024 Bytes
  • 1 GB = 1,000,000,000 Bytes
  • 1 GiB = 1,024 x 1,024 x 1,024 Bytes

 

Spread the word. Please!

EMC Elect 2015 – Who are the EMC Elect? You decide!

Posted by on August 25, 2014 No comments
EMC Elect 2015 nominations are open!

The events in which the EMC Elect 2014 are participating are still in full swing and although a lot of people aren’t thinking about 2015 yet, some of you might have wondered when the nominations for 2015 will start.

The nominations are open!

Last year the nominations for 2014 were opened at around EMC World ’13, but as of today you can nominate your community “hero” (or more than one) to become EMC Elect 2015. So think it through: if you know people who you think deserve to be Elect 2015, fill out the nomination form and participate in the nomination process of the new batch for 2015!

Please use this link to nominate: http://emc.im/Elect2015Nom

EMC Elect 2015 nominations are open!

Symmetrix offers a new kind of MAXimum Virtualisation (VMAX)

Posted by on July 8, 2014 8 comments
100-200-400K

The mother of all arrays has just been given an upgrade!

Well ok, maybe EMC did not produce the mother, since it’s fair to say IBM 3390 disk subsystem came first, but since the first Symmetrix came out in the early 90s with as much as a dozen or two disks, EMC has come a long way. They set the standard when it came to enterprise storage arrays. And it wasn’t just size that mattered back then: performance was and is still the number one objective for the Symms. After the “dark ages” (roughly before the year 2000) things got serious with the DMX series in 2003. The number of disks went up and loads of cache had to make sure that performance was guaranteed. DMX1, DMX2, DMX3/4 were quite a success.

And then there was VMAX

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