Blade Watch

www.handybackup.net

Hardware errors, data corruption, viruses and spyware or simple deleting important information by mistake are just few reasons that we are trying to prevent data loss and protect the associated operational processes. Insuring hardware assets from different kinds of disasters seems quite real for everybody. How to insure most valuable asset: information and information’s integrity?

Handy Backup by Novosoft LLC is award-winning automatic data backup and disaster recovery solution for laptops and desktops working under Windows operating system and Windows Server-based enterprise networks. Handy Backup is highly flexible software and you can tune it up easily to fulfill all your individual requirements:

* Handy Backup provides ability to perform full, incremental and mirror backup types, in addition backup software allows you to synchronize data between computers including computers in remote locations.
* Handy Backup has no limitations on quantity of files, which you can backup and restore with it in one task. Developers and users successfully tested program to backup more than 1 million files in one task.
* Such necessary for up-to-date backup software features as backup scheduling, backup data compression and encryption are fully supported by Handy Backup, as well as time stamps, email notifications and more.

Handy Backup can backup files and folders, Desktop, Windows registry, backup e-mail clients such as Outlook, Outlook Express and others, backup program settings and other simple things, which importance couldn’t be overestimated, when it comes to make our everyday life a bit more comfortable.

I read this and thought I would use it to remind us all of the importance of the backups, both in terms of having a backup solution in place, but also in having that backup solution configured for that environment, something I have been discussing with colleagues in the virtualization space. As we change the infrastructure we need to be identifying what back office functions, security patching, system management, reporting and the backups are managed and reported on, in order to continue to evolve the infrastructure.

At the same time we need to ensure that there is a link between what is being backed up and what people expect/perceive to be backed up, it’s all to easy to assume that everything is being backed up without the understanding about capacity and the processes of what is in and out of scope.

I got an email from Anne, who’s got her first HP server:

“The ILO keeps reporting that it has failed, but we haven’t plugged it in, can I stop it from doing this? I Didn’t want to read a long manual for this and hoped you might know.

Hope you can let me know

Anne ”

My response:

“Great to hear from you Anne, please find the enclosed attachments for your review, I’ll also publish them on the blog later today. If you need anything else, email me or give me a call….”

PowerPoint Document- configuring HP Management Agents

PDF Document – configuring HP Management Agents

We’re doing some work on the bladewatch site over the next few weeks, and we’re going to take a look at the format of the site/content.

The content, the essence of what the site represents isn’t going to change (we’ve been doing this for 3 years or 4759 posts), we’re simply looking to keep the blog informative, balanced and of real added value to our readers.  So some of the pages might be getting re-organized to make finding information easier, the documentation will be improved and more accessible.

You may have seen an example of this with our presentation or the content on our documentation page, welcome to servering our category will transform to get it’s own page and specific content.

The aim of the game has always been information exchange, ideas and bullet points on how to make it better, our commitment therefore to our audience and our readership therefore continues and if you have any ideas/comments, feel free to get in touch (martin237@gmail.com).

A reminder about Compaq/HP lights out functionality.  Originally we had the RIB card which was then superseded by the RILOE card, both were external PCI cards which gave separate lights out independent of the operating system and the slot where the card was fitted dependent on the server itself.  The next generation of Compaq/HP servers came with ILO (Integrated Lights Out) and now ILO2 which provided on board remote lights out administration. Below is a mixture of posts, web links and documents to help with your ILO/RIB/RILOE challenges.

• RIB card – firmware v2.53 (current version)
  
• RILOE card – firmware 1.20 9 (current version)
  
• ILO – firmware 1.94 (current version)
  
• ILO2 – firmware 1.79 9 (current version)
  
• RIB/RILOE slot matrix from HP
• RIB/RILOE picture
• Fitting RIB card document / video / pdf
• RIB/ILO explained and basics
• RIB/RILOE/ILO performance
• ILO – XML configuration script, just change the values to your required ones and using HPoncfg to configure
• Documentation from HP including FAQ
• Tips to fix broken ILO on blade/server
• Identifying if your server has ILO
• ILO firmware upgrade script
• Output ILO configuration to file
• ILO configuration

I was having a conversation with Jim, a ‘common services’ manager based in a midsize financial organization in the city. I’d met him for lunch and was asking him what he was currently working on, and at that, I’ll let the story below unfold, the organization is looking at it’s file services issues and working out what to do next.

It all came as a result of an issue they’d been having with data. You see the organization had one file cluster, two Windows servers in a cluster with terrabytes of data shared over several drives, each up to 800GB, each drive corresponding to a business line or department.

The business had requested more storage, Jim’s response was that they needed to start deploying a new cluster with more storage, with failover and then deploy data de-duplication technologies to sit through the data an therefore archive/delete what wasn’t needed.

Below is the conversation we had, I’ve removed any customer/business specific information:

Is the data application or business line specific?

No it’s shared file data which has been hosted on our shared file cluster server, so the J drive might host IT and IT development data. Each share corresponds to a business line, but we don’t run applications off the file server, except for a few specific desktop functions but not in high volume. It’s static data.

Are there any existing quotas in place restricting data growth/size?

No we create a share on a drive and the business units on that drive share that space with whoever is also on that drive. If a share gets too big, we move that share on to its own separate drive.

What archiving do you have in place?

We periodically scan and delete old files, the data is also backed up to tape.

Ok, but what stops me hoarding data on the file server, keeping everything online?

Well nothing really, but we do delete old files when possible. Often the business say no though.

What are the backups like?

They’re ok, we’ve been having issues with capacity but that’s to be expected as the amount of data we have to backup increases.

What’s the lead time on a restore? If I log a call how long will it take?

Well, restores are not an incident, they are dealt with, but not as a priority, the priority is resolving incidents. It’s a lead time of a day or two.

Is there a per gb cost for putting data on the file server?

Our existing billing process is based around the per device cost, you pay a fee for your desktop or laptop, that includes a fixed fee which pays for your file and print. So no, there is no fee per gb, but then I don’t think the business would pay that if there was.

It’s an interesting coversation and highlights a few issues. IT and the business want to fix the problem, and they’re throwing money at it, they’ve been told four new servers plus fibre cards and a lot of storage. However, if we take a few steps back, before we spend money do we not need to fix our core? Fix the causal factors (as you get taught in history), not the secondary or tertiary factors?

The causal factors are:

• Lack of standards for data archiving
• Lack of data limits or quotas – I can backup my pc onto the file server
• The billing system does not encourage people to think about the data they are consuming
• The restore process is not responsive enough – could this be making people keep everything online?
• There is no separation in data duties between priority and back office data, IT might fill up the drive with restores, stopping development with their SourceSafe project.

The secondary issues factors are:

• File server is getting full
• Drives are getting fragmented and therefore slower at supplying data to the end user
• Backups are taking longer to run

Do we not in essence simply need to turn it around and have a discussion, a data amnesty if you like with the business sponsors and say, “we can either spend a few hundred thousand pounds in parts and people, or we can re-engineer our existing setup and fix the issue?”

• When we hear that the users don’t want to delete their data, are we asking the right people?
• When we say restores are not a priority, do we need to change that, either through giving users opportunities to restore data, or establishing a micro team of two or three people that only do restores, rather than bundling it under whatever department it currently sits?
• Have we thought about isolating user, business and private data rather than combining all three data forms on the same system?

When you ask Jim, the challenge he has is he knows this:

“I know, I know, we need to implement data archiving, we some kind of quota system, and we need to re-organize the way we do file services, but we’re at end game, I’m getting told by the business, we’ve got budget, just fix it, on the one hand, and a general understanding that I never get funding when it works. That’s easier to take the funding, buy a new system and migrate users than it is to try and fix the existing one and retrospectively install rules and procedures.

Often it can be easier to ’start again’ blame the new system and say it’s best that way than to go back and start changing things with people saying that important phrase, but why, it works, leave it alone, what have you done.

Key, we don’t get investment or funding for shared IT services unless they’re broken and it might take months to sign off funding, so whenever we get the chance we take it.”

With that in mind, are we spending money we don’t need to spend in order to avoid an emotional conversation, to avoid some office politics? How much of the IT budget city wide are we ‘mis-investing’ simply because we are unable/unwilling to communicate with our business sponsors and end user community?

In essence by making funding a challenge, are we not increasing our costs, because although I could fix what we have, you wont give me money for future investment, how do we turn this around and develop trust and understanding?

So we’ve decided on a server, maybe for SharePoint, to host our files rather than Janet’s old desktop, or to host our Exchange. We could simply re-install Windows server on one of the desktops, that will work fine, but let us this time, look at buying a new server, and see what we need to think about.

Let us begin on form factor, like the desktop, servers come in many shapes and sizes. We’re going to stay in the x86 world simply for simplicty, but the other processors follow similar concepts.

• Rack server – typically designed and purchased with installing a computer rack in mind, they will have rails which the server sits on, range in u size, 1u being about 2 inches or so.
• Tower server – ranging in size from something a little bit bigger than your desktop to the larger ones with space for more disks and components. Can be placed in any location or under the team desks.
• Blade server – these are smaller servers which fit inside an enclosure and let you have a large number of servers in a smaller footprint, usually installed in a rack, but there are now small business versions which can sit in a space in your office.

So for our first server, we’ll typically look at a tower server, something we can sit in the office, that isn’t too noisy and doesn’t mean we need to buy a cabinet/rack. Going forward though, if you’re going to need more servers soon, you might find it better to be looking at a rack server or blade server – but note blade servers are cheaper when bought in bulk as you have to buy the enclosure (chassis) to connect the blades up.

In terms of processors, there are many to choose from you’ll need to think about how fast you need the server to be, consider the memory and storage you need, and remember that unless your server is running calculations or database work, the processor might not be the most important part, think about the storage, the memory and the network.

On to memory, how much memory do you need now? How many slots for memory does the server have? The more the slots, the more upgradeable it is, it all though depends what you’re doing with the server. If it’s a file/SharePoint server, your first server 4 slots should do fine, just leave a few slots spare, in case you need to add more memory later.

On storage there are a few things to be thinking about:

• RAID
• Type of hard drives – SAS / SATA

RAID is a technology which allows you to have a degree of redundancy so that if one of your hard drives were to fail, the server might continue as normal without loosing any data. Most servers these days come with some RAID functionality, or the option to include RAID. Whether you need this depends on the importance of your data and your backup solution. We’re going to cover this in detail in part 2 – standards/best practice.

• Types of drive – there are two main types, SAS and SATA. SAS is the industrial strength SCSI based disk technology, SATA is the next generation IDE, typically server guys would always go for SCSI drives given the choice, though your choice will probably depend on your budget and requirements. Do check if the drives are hot swap/hot pluggable, this means if the drive fails, you can remove the faulty drive and plug in a new one without switching off the server. Check the capacity/performance of the drives against your requirements. Remember if you ask a server guy they will always say SCSI because that’s what they’ve been raised with, so do look around and price up the difference, make a judgement based on your needs not what Gary says based on preference.

Network card, let’s not get too emotional here, as long as there is one network card, as long as that card can do up to 1GB, it’ll be fine. Unless you’re doing virtualization, unless you need to have a ‘load balanced’ network card, one port will do, most servers have that on board.

Operating systems – this just in terms of think about now and the future, think about licensing, if you’re moving towards your first server, is it Windows server you need, a copy of Linux or Windows XP? Consider what it is the server is doing, what the application software you’re going to install will need, and check out the different options. As a file server, linux as a file server might be ideal, but if you’ve got XP/Vista already deployed, moving towards Windows server need not be that much of a jump in terms of knowledge or complexity, covering the Windows server maintenance basics will be in article 3.

Do remember to check out the warranty/support pack to check it meets your needs, like next day response parts and labour etc.

Of the top of my head, some tower servers to look at:

• Dell PowerEdge T100 – http://www.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/server-poweredge-t100/pd.aspx?refid=server-poweredge-t100&cs=555&s=biz
• Fujitsu Primergy TX110 S1 – http://ts.fujitsu.com/products/standard_servers/tower/primergy_tx100s1.html
• HP Proliant ML110 G5 – http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF25a/15351-15351-241434-241646-3328424-3577708.html
• IBM X3200 M3 – http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/hardware/tower/x3200m3/index.html

The server world is a vast place. In the vendor world there are so many vendors large and small, so many vendors offering be-spoke solutions or a one size fits all approach, a solution for that need, a configuration based on this price. Where as in the end user world, there’s just so many different end users, so many businesses with their own requirements and budgets, with different levels of experience with computers, with Windows or RAID, let alone virtualization or grid computing.

With that in mind, over the next few weeks, we’ve put together ‘welcome to servering’, a four part series, answering all the things you need to think about when buying your first server.

Not only is it a great way of reaching out, to onboard more customers and more end users, it’s always also very good to remind us that, we’re all at different stages in our business and our IT, a chance to cover the basics and stay away from the nonsense that is, judgemental IT speak, “you mean you don’t know….”, it’s all about empowerment through engagement.

The first part is today, and we’ll do the next parts each week.