IT Answers » Storage in 2010

Are LTO tapes backwards compatible. Why would I not be able to read old tapes?

Karl Gechlik — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 15:15:20 +0000

New Answer by Michael Tidmarsh

Add a drive to a Raid 5 without destroying the data

Karl Gechlik — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 15:10:13 +0000

Can you change the amount of drives in a raid 5 array? For example we now have 6 136 GB drives in our raid 5 array. Can we add one more drive to the array as either a hot spare or actually part of the array? Currently the array uses all 6 drives.

Any applications to protect data on hard drives?

Rizwandean — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 00:11:12 +0000

I am wondering if there are any applications available in the market which would allow me to protect my hard drive data.

Are there any tools which would prevent a hard drive from being accessible if it was removed from a computer and plugged into another computer or a portable hard drive case? I realize that BIOS and user passwords are mandatory however there have been cases where hard drives have been stolen from the machines and the data extracted.

Any help with this would be truly appreciated.

how can insert values in array throw Scanner class or wrapper class?

Scjp — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 07:21:32 +0000

how can insert values in array throw Scanner class or wrapper class?

BRMS and Tape Management

Hugheswilliams — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 18:47:54 +0000

Hi, I have BRMS for [strong]Backup Management [/strong]and[strong] [/strong]IBM System Storage TS3310 Tape Library for [strong]tape management[/strong].I have few questions regarding these 2 technologies: 1.Under normal circumstances the tape configuration is as follows: Description Status TAPMLB03 VARIED ON TAP03 VARIED OFF When I have to take the backup or restore,do I have to vary on TAP03 and vary off TAPMLB03? Also how do I check if the correct tape is loaded in the tape drive? Do I run the command DSPTAP DEV(TAPMLB03) VOL(EA01298D) or DSPTAP DEV(TAP03) VOL(EA01298D) ? While doing the restore or taking the backup,what is the device name which I have to give…..TAP03 or TAPMLB03 2.Regarding IBM System Storage TS3310 Tape Library how do I move the data cartridge from one Logical Library to another logical library.I actually want to know how to decide to which location in the target logical library the tape is to be moved.? Please advice

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How to merge 2 disks on 1 hard drive to create a large storage server for archived data? (Poweredge 2800 and Windows Server 2003)

ODSTech — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 19:38:45 +0000

I have an old Dell PowerEdge server that I want to convert to a large data storage server – nothing on it but archived data. The hard drive has been formatted to have about 70G on the C drive and about 130G on a different drive. BUT both drives are located on the same hard drive. How can I get all the space to show up on one drive?

VMWare, Windows, Deduplication, Defragmentation: Bad combo?

ITKE — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 20:12:52 +0000

I was in a meeting the other day talking about our VMWare implementation and one of our Windows engineers brought up a comment that I wanted to throw out to everyone.

He was told by a VMWare engineer that if you run Windows defragmenation on the virtual server while also are using de-duplication on the storage, it can cause corruption of data on the virtual server and/or the VMDK. He hasn’t been able to get any documentation on this fact, so we are not sure if this is true or not.

Does anyone have any experience with this or know of anyone who has? Any information would be appreciated. Thanks.

Has anyone used StarWind iSCSI for production network? What about its reliability and performance?

ITKE — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 17:13:33 +0000

StarWind claims to turn any standard server into a fault-tolerant, fail-safe Windows iSCSI target SAN. Compared to EMC and Netapp products, where does it stand in term of performance & reliability (e.g. assuming new & stable server)? Has anyone deployed it on production? What kind of hardware do you use/recommend (e.g. Dell R410 etc)? Can StarWind support advanced features like deduplication & thin replication?

Looking for software to allow arbitrary apps to share arbitary data amongst themselves

ITKE — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 13:42:46 +0000

I’m looking for a software that would allow arbitrary applications to share arbitrary data amongst themselves. Data suppliers could communicate with the service to “publish” what data they have available. Consumers can ask the service for what data is available. Consumers do not necessarily work in a “subscribe” model, because there may be a large history of data desired to be downloaded.

Hopefully this would be via some C/C++ library, but if it’s an open protocol of some sort, we can write the library for it.
Authentication mechanisms are also needed to ensure applications can only get the subset of data they’re authorized to receive. Software would preferably be open source, since we’ll almost assuredly need to tweak for our environment. Software will be installed locally, so we can’t use a cloud service somewhere else. A lot of the software I’ve investigated thus far seems to lack at least several of the above requirements.
If there is a software that is close, doesn’t meet all the requirements, but is open source, my organization can edit for our needs.

SQL Server 2005: Improving performance of Multiple Databases & LUNS

Bulldog98 — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 17:25:24 +0000

I am looking at ways to improve performance of our databases. We have 4 large databases (ranging between 50gb and 200gb each) on a single SQL Server 2005 Cluster. Currently they are split 2 on one LUN and 2 on another. I am looking at ways to improve the IO performance of the databases as they are quite IO intensive. I have been investigating options to create 6 LUN’s and reduce the number of MDF files for each database from 8 to 6 and then spreading the MDF’s across all 6 LUN volumes. Currently we have 16 disks for LUN1 in RAID 10 and 16 disks for LUN2 RAID 10. If I proceed with the changes I am investigating then we would have 6 LUNS with 6 disks each in RAID 10. 1 data file per a database will sit on each LUN. Should this improve performance? does anyone have experience in this area that they could share?