Storage Archives - Justin's IT Blog

zPlanner – Replication Planning Super Tool

Posted on July 14, 2018 by Justin Paul | 2 Comments

What is zPlanner? Project goals As more and more companies make the decision to explore public cloud it has become very important to be able to gather statistical data from those workloads and analyze it for things like change rate,…

Answering Josh’s EMC VNXe Questions

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Justin Paul | 1 Comment

Josh left a great comment for me on the new VNXe Host and LUN setup post, I felt the questions, and their answers, were important enough for a post of their own. Here they are: [stextbox id=”black” caption=”Josh’s Comment”] Awesome…

EMC VNXe1600 – Configuring Hosts and LUNs

Posted on December 17, 2015 by Justin Paul | 6 Comments

The VNXe1600 is the block only version of the VNXe3200. For SMB sized VMware environments this is the perfect storage array as it allows the customer to add FAST Cache, it allows them to mix and match drive and raid…

Direct Attach Fiber Channel with the EMC VNXe3200

Posted on October 29, 2014 by Justin Paul | 10 Comments

The demo box that I have from EMC does not have the fiber channel mez card in it, but last week I did get a chance to configure a VNXe3200 with direct attached fiber channel hosts for the first time…

My roadmap for the VNXe series

Posted on August 8, 2014 by Justin Paul | 5 Comments

Disclaimer: I don’t work for EMC and I don’t have any inside information that any other customer or partner wouldn’t have. I also have no more influence over the product direction than any customer or partner would. The thoughts in…

VNXe3200 Managing Storage and Cache

Posted on August 7, 2014 by Justin Paul | 13 Comments

The VNXe3200 is almost identical to both the previous VNXe’s as well as the VNX series of SAN’s in that it uses Unisphere for management. However, the version of Unisphere running on the 3200 is a very different once you…

VNXe 3200 Controller Failover Behavior

Posted on August 6, 2014 by Justin Paul | 24 Comments

Two years ago I posted an article describing how the VNXe3100 (and 3300 and 3150) had a major drawback in the way that it handled IO during a controller reboot or failure. If you didn’t get a chance to experience…

Upgrading unified VNX freezes; leaves Unisphere broken

Posted on April 23, 2014 by Justin Paul | 7 Comments

Last week I was upgrading a VNX5300 unified to FLARE 32, since FLARE 31 will be end of support soon, and ran into some issues. This is the first time I had ever had this happen to me, but apparently…

Hands on with the new EMC VNX5400

Posted on October 9, 2013 by Justin Paul | 15 Comments

This week I was onsite with a customer setting up their new virtualization environment and got to play with a couple of the new EMC VNX5400’s. I wont go through all the marketing stuff as there are plenty of places…

HP AP770B (Brocade 825) Direct Attach SAN Fix

Posted on July 12, 2013 by Justin Paul | 25 Comments

Yesterday while setting up a new SAN for a customer I ran into issues when I tried to connect the ESXi hosts. The servers saw the HP branded Brocade 825 Cards after I installed the drivers, but no LUN’s were…