Welcome to the SAN Guy blog! Thank you to everyone who has supported this site over the years with your comments and helpful knowledge sharing. I appreciate all of the positive feedback I’ve received over the years. I’ll continue to share posts relating to enterprise storage technology in the form of news, articles, troubleshooting guides, command references, scripting, and general administration information.
A new addition to my blog is the community forum, which anyone with a wordpress account can post to. I plan on sharing information on the forum in addition to my regular blog posts. I wanted to give the opportunity to my readers to share related content that may be useful to the storage community in general.
Below is a categorized site map of my blog posts.
      Scripting (Automation and Reporting)
| Read | Scripting Alias and Zone creation for Brocade Switches |
| Read | Scripting automatic reports for Isilon from the CLI |
| Read | Automating Config / Zone backups for Brocade Switches |
| Read | Easy reporting on data domain using the autosupport log |
| Read | Reporting on Clariion / VNX Block Storage Pool capacity with a bash script |
| Read | Reporting on Trespassed LUNs |
| Read | Reporting on Soft media errors |
| Read | Disk space reporting on sub folders on a Celerra/VNX File CIFS shared file system |
| Read | Reporting on LUN auto-tier distribution |
| Read | Tiering reports for EMC’s FAST VP |
| Read | Reporting on Celerra / VNX NAS Pool capacity with a bash script |
| Read | Celerra replication monitoring script |
| Read | Automating Storage Processor % Utilization alerts with EMC Performance Manager |
| Read | Alerting on Celerra / VNX File SP Failover |
| Read | Scripting an alert for checking the availability of individual CIFS server shares |
| Read | Reporting on the the auto-tiering job state |
| Read | Auto transferring reports from a Celerra to a windows web server via FTP |
| Read | Auto generating daily performance graphs with EMC Control Center / Performance Manager |
| Read | Pure Storage data reduction report |
| Read | Reporting on the Estimated Job Completion Times for FAST VP Data Relocation |
| Read | Scripting a VNX/Celerra to Isilon Data Migration with EMCOPY and Perl |
| Read | Custom Reporting with Isilon OneFS API Calls |
    Command Line (CLI) Reference Guides
| Read | EMC XtremIO CLI Reference Guide |
| Read | ViPR Controller CLI Reference Guide |
| Read | NetApp Clustered ONTAP CLI Reference Guide |
| Read | Data Domain CLI Command Reference Guide |
| Read | Brocade FOS CLI Command Reference Guide |
| Read | VNX NAS CLI Command Reference Guide |
| Read | Celerra Health Check with CLI Commands |
| Read | Undocumented Celerra / VNX File commands |
| Read | Using the database query option on Celerra & VNX File commands |
| Read | EMC ECS CLI Command Reference |
| Read | Isilon CLI Command Reference |
| Read | Brocade Switch Type Matrix |
| Read | Default Passwords for IT Vendors |
   Troubleshooting
This group of posts relate to specific technical issues I’ve had over the years, and the steps that I took to resolve them.
| Read | VMWare/ESX can’t write to a Celerra Read/Write NFS mounted datastore |
| Read | Powerpath Install / Upgrade Issues |
| Read | Can’t join CIFS Server to domain – sasl protocol violation |
| Read | Powerpath commands in AIX causing unexpected errors / initialization errors. |
| Read | Problem with soft media errors on SSD drives and FastCache |
| Read | DM Interconnect failure with Celerra Replicator |
| Read | How to troubleshoot EMC Control Center WLA Archive issues |
| Read | A guide for troubleshooting CIFS issues on the Celerra |
| Read | Unable to provision Celerra storage? |
| Read | Long Running FAST VP relocation job |
| Read | Frequent 0x622 and 0x606 errors in the SP Event Logs |
| Read | Rescan Storage System command on Celerra results in conflict:storageID-devID error |
| Read | Celerra / VNX File replication job creation errors when selecting destination |
| Read | Errors when creating new replication jobs |
| Read | VPLEX initiator paths dropped |
| Read | Close requests fail on data mover when using Riverbed Steelhead appliance |
| Read | Celerra Disk Provisioning Wizard incorrectly believes there are not enough drives available for provisioning |
| Read | Web interface disabled on brocade switch |
| Read | Dynamic allocation pool limit has been reached |
| Read | VPLEX Unisphere Login hung at “Retrieving Meta-Volume Information” |
| Read | Troubleshooting NAS Discovery issues on EMC Ionix Control Center (ECC) |
| Read | VNX NAS Files incorrectly report as Locked for Editing |
  Guides
These posts are more instructional, and provide the steps necessary to resolve various hardware and software tasks.
| Read | Storage Performance Metrics |
| Read | Storage Performance Benchmarking with FIO |
| Read | Configuring a Brocade Switch for Access Gateway (AG) Mode |
Read |
How to scrub/zero out data on a decommissioned VNX or Clariion |
Read |
Disabling Telnet on Brocade Switches |
Read |
Collecting info on active shares, clients, protocols, and authentication on the Celerra |
| Read | Testing Disaster Recovery for VDM’s and CIFS servers |
| Read | Generating and installing SSL requests, keys, and certificates on EMC ECS |
| Read | Installing the EMC ECS CLI Package |
| Read | VPLEX Health Check |
| Read | Using the server_stats command on Celerra / VNX File |
| Read | The steps for NFS exporting a file system on a VDM |
| Read | Use the CLI to determine replication job throughput |
| Read | How to reserve a Celerra / VNX NAS share for a single file type or group of file types |
| Read | How to create a clone of a file system on a Celerra or VNX using nas_copy |
| Read | Relocating Celerra Checkpoints |
| Read | Upgrading EMC Ionix Control Center from Update Bundle 12 (UB12) to Update Bundle 14 (UB14) |
| Read | Optimizing Java Memory for Navisphere / Unisphere |
| Read | Adding a Celerra to a Clariion storage domain from the CLI |
| Read | Strategies for implementing Multi-tiered FAST VP Storage Pools |
| Read | Gathering performance data on a virtual windows server |
| Read | Using Microsoft’s BranchCache with the Celerra & VNX |
| Read | Adding/Removing modules from a datamover |
| Read | Use the CLI to quickly determine the size of your Celerra checkpoint filesystems |
| Read | Creating an NFS export from a file system on a Virtual Data Mover (VDM) |
| Read | Matching LUNs and UIDs when presenting VPLEX LUNs to Unix hosts |
| Read | Celerra data mover performance and port configuration |
| Read | Easy File Extension filtering with EMC Celerra |
| Read | Archiving NAZ and NAR files from EMC VNX and Clariion arrays |
| Read | Using isi_vol_copy_vnx for VNX to Isilon data migration |
| Read | Isilon SnapshotIQ and SyncIQ Management |
| Read | Using the InsightIQ IIQ_Data_Export Utility |
| Read | Changing the Login banner on a Celerra / VNX File control station |
| Read | NetApp FAS Zero disk procedure |
| Read | Block and File VNX Password Change Procedure |
| Read | Filesystem Alignment |
| Read | Mutiprotocol VNX File Systems: Listing and counting Shares & Exports by file system |
| Read | Root replication checkpoints |
| Read | A guide for troubleshooting CIFS issues on the Celerra |
| Read | Isilon Mitrend Data Gathering Procedure |
    Articles
These posts are general articles about storage related topics. These represent more of my opinions on the subject matter rather than my other more technically detailed posts.
| Read | A Roundup of Storage Startups |
| Read | Blockchain and Enterprise Storage |
| Read | Storage Class Memory and Emerging Technologies |
| Read | The Future of Storage Administration |
| Read | Open Source Storage Solutions |
| Read | Defining Software-Defined Storage: Benefits, Strategy, Use Cases, and Products |
| Read | A Primer on Object Storage |
| Read | Machine Learning, Cognitive Computing, and the Storage Industry |
| Read | What’s the difference between a Storage Engineer and a Storage Administrator? |
| Read | What is VPLEX? |
| Read | What is EMC’s CAVA / Common Event Enabler? |
| Read | Making a case for file archiving |
| Read | What’s new in FLARE 32? |
    Other
These are various posts I’ve made that don’t fit neatly into the above categories or may be a bit out of date.
| Read | VNX vs. V7000 |
| Read | VNX vs. XIV |
| Read | Gartner’s Market Share Analysis for Storage Vendors |
| Read | Magic Quadrant for Storage Vendors |
| Read | Performance Data Collection/Discovery issues in ProSphere 1.5.0 |
| Read | EMC World 2012 – Thoughts on Isilon |
| Read | ProSphere 1.6 Updates |
| Read | EMC World 2015 |
| Read | Comparing Dot Hill and EMC Auto Tiering |
| Read | Critical Celerra FCO for Mac OS X 10.7 |
| Read | What’s new in EMC Control Center Update Bundle 14 (UB14)? |
| Read | EMC World 2012 – Thoughts on preparing for a VDI deployment |
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Hi,
Are you trying anything with EMC Storage using Python?
I haven’t personally done any custom scripting with python as it relates to EMC hardware, no. There is quite a bit out there already, take a look at https://github.com/emc-openstack/storops.
This is good start, it is limited to VNX and Unity. I’m keen on VMAX. Let me know pls should you find any
Hi,
I have one question. WE have a VNX7600 storage. Recently we have upgraded its FAST cache from 512GB to 1100GB (Doubled it.) But post upgrade of FAST cache, the utilization of controllers increased by 20-25%. Before the upgrade the utilization on both the controllers were around 50-55% and post upgrade it is 70-75%. Ideally it should decreased. EMC has said it is the normal behaviour post upgrade because whenever FAST cache is upgrade utilization will increase and not decrease. I am not able to understand this. Kindly help in understanding this.
Hi Rajeev,
It’s hard to say for certain without analyzing your array. I can tell you that The FAST Cache driver has to track every I/O in order to calculate whether a block needs to be promoted to FAST Cache, which adds to the SP CPU utilization. When upgrading FASTCache the cache needs to be deleted and then it slowly recreates after the upgrade as it identifies hot data, which would lead to additional CPU workload at least in the short term. Your best bet for reducing SP utilization would be to Disable FAST Cache for LUNs unlikely to need it, especially LUNs that have sequential I/O, like oracle database logs. I’ll do a complete write-up of FASTCache best practices soon and review the other important things you should take a look at. Thanks for the comment!
great job love from argentina!