Category Archives: Storage

When RAID is not equal to High Availability

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Know your storage devices before buying something “just as good”.

An SMB experience using low-cost iSCSI storage devices

One objection we typically hear from potential clients is why vendor X costs more than vendor Y for the same features and specifications. Today, it is not uncommon in the storage market (SANs and NAS) to know that that you are buying more than specs and need to look more in-depth when you find a low-cost alternative for a technology that previously was considered too expensive for your organization.

My recent client experience exemplifies this problem. The storage needs have grown over the past several years and exceeded their file server capacity. Their business requires the long-term retention of image files for every device they manufacture and the repository is approaching 25 years-old. Many of these image files may never be retrieved unless a customer requests them or engineering is researching a design or manufacturing defect. Their daily requirement is to capture high-resolution images of their products and continuously store them as they are prepared for final shipment.

The annual IT budget planning always includes a small SAN for the long term storage and daily storage of these important image files. However, the first item to typically be removed from the budget is the SAN due to what is considered the high cost of the product. Last year this changed, with the introduction of a low-cost, high-value storage device from Buffalo Technology. Who would not want an 8TB rack mount iSCSI RAID5 storage device for $2500 that is “just as good” as small iSCSI SAN for $15,000? The IT budget could surely accommodate such a low-cost, high-value item.

The first year was uneventful and the device performed as advertised. Recently, the device configured with four 2TB SATA drives indicated a drive failure in Slot1. This should not be a problem, as we all know RAID5 will keep running with a single failed drive. A call to Buffalo Technology and the completion of some basic troubleshooting confirmed the problem. A new hard drive replaced under warranty would solve the problem. After jumping through several hoops, chasing confirmation emails, faxing in receipts and paying $100 for an advance replacement my new drive showed up six days later. Yes, I could have paid more for next-day shipping, after the receipt was faxed in, validated by customer service, and payment was submitted to their website. I suspect next-day shipping would still require at least three to four days for the drive to show up.

The instructions delivered with the drive were minimal at best. Update firmware on the device, and insert the new drive. Why would I want to update firmware on an iSCSI storage device that already has a failed hard drive is not something I want to risk and potentially lose all the data? Things happen in IT we all can attest to.

The new drive was inserted, the red LED started to blink and I waited, and waited, and it appeared to be rebuilding the array. I came back after a weekend and it was still blinking. I could not see progress on the rebuild and the product manual gave no indication of the actual process, but being an IT professional I have worked with many RAID5 storage devices that when a failed drive is detected and removed, and a new drive is inserted it just starts rebuilding and your done after several hours.

Not this device, a call to support confirms that you need to go into the web interface, detect the new drive, and then select some menu items to initiate the rebuild.That did not go as planned, and support had to check with a more knowledgeable resource. After a brief wait on the phone I was told to dismount the iSCSI storage device and start the rebuild again. I responded that dismounting the iSCSI device would take my storage offline and make in unavailable to my network of users. Why would this be a requirement for a RAID5 iSCSI storage device used by business? I followed their recommendations and then discovered it would be 33 hours for the array to rebuild with the new drive. I now had a client that was not happy that their RAID5 iSCSI storage device that was “just as good” as a more expensive iSCSI SAN would require them to stop using it for 33 hours while the array was rebuilt. The final outcome was that the unit was restored and all data stayed intact, however, the experience with a product that was “just as good” was much less than expected.

Paul R. Cook
Paul R. Cook
Vice President, Network Services Group
Paul.Cook@CustomSystems.com

 

 

© Copyright 2014 Custom Systems Corporation

Time to backup your backup

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Don’t lose what’s important

scyther5Everyone has files that are important to them and it would be a disaster if they were lost.  Years’ worth of pictures from graduations, kids growing up, and even items like tax returns or import documents that have been scanned for digital file storage.  Keeping digital files can make it easier to store, as well as search for later.  The problem is, what happens if your hard drive crashes and you lose everything?  A good backup plan is something that most people tend to forget about.  Many people will backup pictures and documents to one main hard drive and believe that is good enough.  What happens if that drive dies?  I had a colleague bring me the external hard drive where she had kept all the pictures of her children growing up.  The drive had crashed and after looking at it, I had to let her know there was nothing I could do to retrieve the files.  The drive was dead.  She lost years of pictures.  She was under the impression that it was on an external drive and that was good enough.  The truth of the matter is, you can never have too many backups.

Don’t be fooled by cloud storage options

Cloud storage programs such as Drop Box, One Drive and Google Drive are great places to store files, but you need to keep them stored somewhere else as well.  For me , I keep my son’s pictures on my laptop and backed up to my Microsoft One Drive account.  Then from time-to-time I will run a backup of those photos to my external hard drive that I keep connected to my wireless router.  This way the pictures and important files are kept on my laptop, in my One Drive cloud storage and also on an external hard drive.  These pictures are so important to me, I will probably even back them up a fourth time to something like DVD.

Do follow the Backup 3-2-1 Rule

This rule states:

3 – Copies of anything you care about – Two isn’t enough if it’s important

2 – Different formats at least (more is always better in this case) – examples of this would be Dropbox (or other cloud storage) + DVD, or hard drive + USB stick

1 – Off-site backup – This means using a cloud storage option such as Carbonite or Crash Plan.

Crash Plan and Carbonite are topics in of themselves, but these are great programs to back up larger amounts of data.  With programs like One Drive and Drop Box, you tend to get one folder that is backed up.  With Crash Plan and Carbonite, you can back up your entire computer if necessary.  Look for upcoming posts about Crash Plan and Carbonite where I will explain exactly how they work and why they are a good choice.  In the meantime make sure you backup your important data by no less than the Backup 3-2-1- Rule.

As always, we welcome your opinion and questions. Do you have a data backup plan in place? How are you keeping your files and precious memories safe?

Ryan Ash
Network Consultant
ryan.ash@customsystems.com
©Custom Systems Corporation 2014

Should You Upgrade to a Solid State (SSD) Hard Drive?

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Spoiler alert! Yes.

At first, I didn’t see the big deal.  They used to cost too much.  Early generation Solid State drives (SSD) had impressive read speeds, but slow write speeds.  And the storage space was not large enough.  That has changed in the last year, as SSD write speeds, prices, and sizes look better and better every day.

So what are the advantages of using an SSD hard drive?  For starters, they are much faster than traditional hard drives.  They have no moving parts, the disks don’t spin, and are therefore less prone to failure.  They are light-weight, making your laptop easier to carry.  SSD drives also give off much less heat than traditional hard drives, so your PC or laptop uses less energy.

Replacing your old hard drive with a new SSD drive can also be very easy.  I purchased a Samsung EVO drive, which included a migration tool.  It only took about 20 minutes to move.  There are also disk copy products available like Acronis or CloneZilla.

After you install your new SSD drive (or if you have one already) remember to disable defrag.  Defragmenting your SSD drive is not only pointless, it can harm your drive.

Another scenario: We just recently began to implement SSD drives in our server  RAID array designs.  So far, we are only using them in RAID 1 configurations – as buying more than 2 SSD drives at this point can still add up to a lot of cash.   But vendors like IBM, EMC, and HP are currently working on new ways to use disk fail-over – which may even lead to new ways of looking at RAID arrays.

Questions? We can help. As always, we can provide your company with a free Network Assessment. Just call or click today.

AZS-4

Chase Reitter
Network Consultant
Chase.Reitter@CustomSystemsCorp.com

 

Time for Windows Server 2003 End-Of-Life Plan

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Windows 2003In previous posts, we’ve described the necessity to upgrade your Windows XP PCs to either Windows 7 or Windows 8.  Today, we are going to discuss the server side of the house.

Microsoft will stop supporting Server 2003 R2 on July 14, 2015.  I know a year can sound far away and over the horizon, but it isn’t – especially when it comes to servers.  A migration from one server to another can either take a few days or several weeks – depending on your infrastructure.   For example, migrating a file server from 2003 to 2008 is fairly straight forward – especially with the help of  Backup/Restore software like Backup Exec.  Backup Exec remembers things like file permissions, so we can backup your data from your old server, and then restore it to the new server.

If you have shared printers on your network, this part of the migration can be a bit more involved.  Not every printer manufacturer will support installing their printers in a 2008 64-bit environment – but we would investigate this for you before we begin the migration.  If your printers are not supported on a 2008 server, it may be time to upgrade those as well.

Support for Exchange 2003 server ended back in January 2008.  Exchange 2007 ‘mainstream support’ ended  April 2012, with extended support ending April 2017.  If you are still using Exchange 2003 or 2007, you should move to a new server immediately.  Custom Systems has done several migrations from 2003 to 2007, and up to Exchange 2010, so we have a clear path to follow.  We have also migrated a few clients from an on-site Exchange Server to Office 365 hosted email, depending on client need.

If you are using your servers to host applications, like Quickbooks or other third-party vendors, a migration from your old server to a new server gets more complicated.  We may need to get the software vendor involved in the process.  Make sure you have access to the latest version of your Applications before trying to move to a new server.  In some cases, we may even need to migrate to a new software product if the older product is no longer supported.

As always, and we would be happy to provide you with a free Network Assessment. Call or click today!

 

AZS-4Chase Reitter
Network Consultant
Chase.Reitter@CustomSystemsCorp.com

 

Things To Do With An Old Server

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This Old Server

Today, we’re going to discuss things you can do with your old server hardware.  With everything going Virtual or Hosted now, sometimes you’re left with an old server that you don’t know what to do with.  Besides the obvious, (boat anchor, paper weight, etc.) we can still put that ol’ reliable server to good use.  Let’s assume that the warranty on your old server is out-of-date, and you have already moved all of your production services to either new supported hardware, or to a hosted service like Office 365.  As an example, our in-house Exchange Email server was migrated to Office 365 several months ago, and a SQL service we were providing has also been moved off-site.  That leaves us with two perfectly good (although old and no longer covered by manufacture warranty) servers.  One of these servers has plenty of disk space, but not a lot of memory.  The other has lots of memory, but not a lot of disk space.  This gave me an idea:  Use an iSCSI connection between the two servers, and setup a development environment.

Making the Old New Again

Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) has been around and in use for about a decade, but vast improvements have been made with Windows Server 2012.  Before today, you had to use either the Microsoft iSCSI add-ons, 3rd party tools, and they were more difficult to manage.  Now you can use the iSCSI tools right from the Windows Server 2012 management console.  But not only are design and setup easier; With higher performance network equipment, iSCSI connections are more reliable, and much faster than they used to be.  But you don’t need to go out and buy fiber optic cards.  Gigabit Ethernet cards can be found in just about any server built in the last five years, and are easy to find.  While I’d like to go out and buy fiber optic cards, this is only for development purposes, and I set a goal in the beginning of this experiment to only use equipment that I already had.  Both of my test servers have dual gigabit cards (two ports each), and will be plenty fast enough.

We have ways of Making You Talk

There are two simple ways to setup your physical iSCSI connection: Use a switch that supports VLANS, or just use an 8wire cross-over cable.  Many Cisco routers include a cross-over cable, so I have a few.  Just make sure that they are 8wire – many cross-over cables only have 4 wires to simply cross the transmit and receive signals – but these can only handle 100mb – and we’re going for the full gigabit here.

After installing Windows 2012 on both servers, I assign a static IP address to both primary NIC cards that resides on my primary subnet (192.168.1.x).  This is for server management purposes, and to connect to the rest of my network.  Then I assign a static IP to the secondary NIC cards that do NOT reside on my primary network, for example 10.0.0.x.  This will keep the iSCSI traffic off of my primary network equipment, and make the traffic between the two iSCSI servers MUCH faster.

Next, I use the Windows 2012 Server tools to setup my primary iSCSI management server (DEVHOST1) and my secondary iSCSI storage server (STORAGE1).  From the Windows Server 2012 management tools,   we assign all of the available disk space on STORAGE1 as a LUN to store our Virtual hard drives, which will be managed by the DEVHOST1 server.

Here’s what it looks like:

old server 1

By keeping the iSCSI network traffic on its own subnet, either on a separate switch or by using a cross-over cable, we improve the performance of both.

I can now install Microsoft Hyper-V on the DEVHOST1 server.  I can then build Virtual Servers with their large files located on the STORAGE1/LUN1 server.

This setup was for a Development environment.  I will be using it to test an Exchange 2013 server and a test SQL 2014 server.  In a production environment, I would be using new and supported hardware.

Custom Systems offers a wide range of new and supported solutions for your production storage and network performance needs.  To find out more, contact us today!

 

old server 3             old server 2

 

 

AZS-4Chase Reitter
Network Consultant
Chase.Reitter@CustomSystemsCorp.com

 

 

 

© Copyright 2014 Custom Systems Corporation

Ready For a Storage Area Network?

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Servers and data storage are a mundane topic for most executives; especially when their primary focus should be on running a profitable business.  Storage Area Networks (SAN) have declined rapidly in price and are no longer a technology for the largest corporations.  Today’s small and medium businesses (SMB) can leverage this technology to create a more flexible computing environment and reduce server costs.

If you are still buying servers with a single purpose, such as — SQL, Exchange, and SharePoint — you are wasting money on hard drives and RAID arrays that can easily double or triple your server costs.  In comparison, an SMB SAN allows you to logically group the hard drives for all your servers into one or two devices that can be connected to all of your servers — providing higher disk performance, higher availability, and faster recovery time in the event of a catastrophic server failure.

By separating the storage from the traditional server (CPU, memory, and network adapters) you increase storage efficiency by only allocating the amount of storage currently required for the server and gain the ability to add storage on the fly.  For instance, if your SQL server demands more disk space – click to allocate it. Or, if your Exchange server has recently archived much of your old email to another system – reduce the amount of disk available to Exchange and increase its performance.

Many departments such as engineering, can go through periods of large storage growth when a new project or New Year approaches.  A SAN allows you to add additional drives on the fly and then allocate them to any server that requires it.  No more surprise IT requests to get a larger server because the current server is maxed out.

Server failure with local RAID arrays are a thing of the past.  When a SAN connected server fails, simply attach the storage on the SAN to a new or backup server and bring your business back online quickly.  No more waiting for tape libraries, and cloud based services to restore all the data to a new server, which can spell two to three days of down time.

What does it cost? That depends on your storage requirements and the number of servers you would like to connect.  A small SAN with two to three servers will start at about $10K.  Your mileage will vary depending on the size and number of the hard drives you will insert into the SAN.  Since all SANs are scalable, you can start with as little as six hard drives and grow to over 200 as your demands increase.  Why not start today?  Reduce your server costs, increase your flexibility, and get back to focusing on what is really import and grow YOUR business.

Paul R. CookPaul R. Cook
Vice President, Network Services
Paul.Cook@CustomSystemsCorp.com

 

 

 

© Copyright 2014 Custom Systems Corporation