Archive for February, 2009
I was shocked to read the title of this article at many of Spanish blogs I visit regularly. It seems NetApp had just declared a net loss of $75 million in its latest fiscal quarter. Few days before that they fired 500 employees to cut the costs. Then few days earlier they seems to buy a $3 million dollar jet for CEO. In some blogs, they assumed it was a privately own jets & on others it was mentioned to be bought by the company. I am not sure which one of the two stories is the truth, but I really hope these 500 employees salaries did not end up making that jet. If so then that is a huge abuse of using the credit crunch schema to fire people. I hope some one from Netapp clear the image in here :).
In Netapp & IBM Nseries filers and gateways (Or any storage running the Data ONTAP and using the WAFL File system) you might face a volume or aggregate inconsistency. Its sad to say if you had this you will need to plan a downtime on the filer or the gateway to fix this. This seems to be more popular on large volumes & aggregate. I had usually seen this mostly on Volumes or Aggregates larges than 1TB. Further more its wide spread on filers and gateways running earlier version of Data ONTAP prior to 7.2.4. If you are still running a Data ONTAP prior to 7.2.4 I highly recommend you update to 7.2.6.1.
Ok this might sound to be a silly task, but when you need to perform it, you might get frustrated. Actually several times we had to move or reassign disks to a different node/filer in our IBM Nseries Cluster. If you are not aware of the IBM Nseries then all I need to tell you its a Netapp box oemed as IBM. So again this post apply to N-Series as well Netapp clustered filers.
TSM Symposium event which used to be held every two years by Oxford University between 1999 – 2007. These events were very usefull with the wide range content discussed at it. It always predicted and scoped the TSM features available and predict up to two years of enhancements. They had always posted their presentation online to ensure people get the value of it over time instead of dying with the end of the event. Check the presentation from the past 5 events at: TSM Symposium events
For many new IBM Tivoli Storage Manager admins the concepts of TSM are a dark box. Even older TSM admins has often missed some of these concepts as they had not use them yet. For that IBM released earlier a very nice TSM posters which explain these concepts. I believe they are great for any TSM admin room. Below is the link for these posters, even if you don’t have a room to hang them on your office wall, just go over them. They more than likely will have something usefull for you.
These posters can be found at:
Please post a comment with what do u think of these posters? I really care to hear how many of you had printed it and used it.
Seems the post title has got your attention. Well guess what it will not take you even 20 minutes to go through the post below, but it will still give you a head out in TSM SQL Query that people who had used TSM for many years have not grasped yet. Its funny to know how many TSM admin I see on daily basis who ask me the same famous question “What SQL select statement that shows me…”. As I had been answering many of these lately, I had decided to share with you how these are built up. If you are new to TSM you would ask your self why do I need these, then the easy answer is that you can easily figure out almost anything in TSM using SQL queries.
A question that frequently come up by TSM Admins that “how to move Nodes to a new Domain?” This is usually the case when you had grouped several nodes under one domain then you needed to change the backup policies for few of them, so you find out the need to move these few nodes to a new policy Domain. Below is a high view of the steps to Move Nodes to a new TSM Domain:
1. Define the following… New Policy domain, policy set, related sequential and copy stgpools, management class(es), copy group(s)
2. Assign new management class as default management class
3. Validate and activate new policy set
4. Update node to reflect domain change
If you got TSM or any other backup solution connected to a tape library or even a single Tape Drive you might get lucky and see one of the Industry Standard Tape Alert Errors. Although these had nothing to do with the backup software you are using. I mean you might be using TSM, Veritas, brightstore or any other backup software and end up with the same standard error message. As these errors are highly related to your tape drive/library Hardware problem or a connectivity problem to your backup server. So no matter what backup software you are using the below Industry Standard Tape Alert Error Flags Might be helpful to you. If you are a TSM implementer please book mark this page as you will never know when you are going to face these errors and then the below list will be invaluable. The below list has been actually copied from the symantec page, but useful for all backup solutions as mentioned earlier :).
As the installation of TSM on Debian might not be an easy task for the average Joe administrator, I thought I will share the automation script I am usually using install TSM on Debian. Actually this script was written for Ubuntu 6.10 by Written by Thomas McCosker 29-06-2007, Sydney Australia – thomas.mccosker@gmail.com. I had been using this shell script for a while and it works great every time :). A lot of my clients are using it as well by now. So a let’s start by a big thanks to Thomas.
