11-2-07
Over the past few weeks I've wrapped up a few more storage-oriented projects that I wanted everyone to be aware of:

Todd Muirhead and I built 2000 1 gigabyte mailboxes on our PowerVault MD1000 direct attached storage with Exchange 2007 cluster continous replication (CCR) and stressed them successfully with Microsoft's LoadGen for an 8 hour test period. With CCR you have an active Exchange node and a passive Exchange node, each with their own copy of the Exchange database on direct-attached storage. The two copies are kept in sync by log shipping from the active node to the passive node. The idea is to let the application handle the replication rather than spending a ton of money for highly available high-end storage. You can see the details here.

I've also added a section on how to write scripts to automate tasks on our MD3000 and MD3000i storage arrays. The management tool for these arrays, the Modular Disk Storage Manager, is a nice tool but after you've created a few dozen LUNs on it manually you start asking yourself if there is a better way. There is and it's called SMCLI or storage manager command line interface. The thing about scripting is, if you try to read the manual to get the syntax it usually takes awhile because you miss a quotation mark or semicolon, but if you have examples to go by you can get started much quicker. Now you do!

That's it for now. ACL was a blast. As usual some of our favorite bands were ones we had never heard of, like Common and Zap Mama (I know, I know, you probably know all about these guys already 'cause you're hip. My wife and I are definitely not hip). Steve Earle was good playing solo, but dude, "Copperhead Road" needs a band!

Dave