Guess we were spoiled by the enterprise support we had in the past from
Hitachi and IBM.  Sometimes they show up before we know that we need them to.

With the NetApp...we lose a head, and its weeks before we get them to come
out.  And, then its extra/separate if we want them to like upgrade the
firmware...even if they say that's the reason we lost the head in the first
place.  Also...we run the NetApp in active-active..and at some magic point we
hit some limit on one side, where some clients can't see all the shares on
it...because it takes too long to generate the full response. (turned off sms
notification for netapp share monitoring because this was
annoying...especially since it frequently happened around 3am every
morning....also our ESX cluster would freak out when it lost its datastore
from the netapp...so we have a few SAN attached datastores)

The 7420 is configured in active/standby....used to be that way with the old
main sun cluster for NFS, but its grown to where its active/active now.

We could use some more sysadmins... there are 3 or 4 openings.... (though
there's a hiring freeze, and only 1 advertised opening that's been exempted
from the freeze...though we're working on getting a second opening out... ) 
Right now there's effectively just 3 admins here....and its making it hard to
do certain projects....especially the afterhours/weekend minimum-2 man jobs. 
(last weekend there were two [unrelated] deaths...so two admins were out of
town that weekend....and poor me being on call....)  The admin that quit
recently used to 'kind of' take care of NAS things.  A former director said
everything rarely got beyond 70% completion...and that admin felt that was
enough for him too.  Though guess I'm more of things are never 100%, so I
never stop fiddling with it.

I have asked to take on some storage responsibility...but guess they think I
already have too many things where I'm the only person that knows it.  A few
years ago I had to ssh from kitchen table of my parent's place in
Calgary...first thing after I got there from the airport....to get things
working again.... a transfer switch failed..as did one UPS, and a row of
servers in the data center went dark.... and there was an oversight where an
even numbered server got put in the odd numbered row....so we lost both DNS
servers and nobody knew how to recover from that.  After that the assistant
and associate directors understood why we used to criss-cross power from the
UPSs and keep them under 50% load.  The server is still in the wrong row, but
I've moved the DNS to other servers (and plan two add 2 more off of secondary
router.), signing zones for DNSSEC is pretty CPU intensive.

After that outage, I keep some important IPs on my (personal) computer...so
that I can get in even if DNS isn't....which came in handy last summer when I
forgot to update registrar with new KSK. :D

On 11/18/2011 7:12 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> I'm going to recommend Andre join the mailing list... Even if it's a 
> temporary thing, it will otherwise be difficult to maintain any fluidity of 
> conversation.  For example, Harvey's original post didn't include Andre's 
> message...  And later when Lawrence posted the message, if I hit reply-all, 
> Andre isn't copied on the reply.  So I added him manually above...
> The link to join the list is 
> https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/discuss
>
>
>> For NAS, we are in the process of transitioning from (a pair) NetApp FAS
>> 3070.....to Oracle 7000 series storage.  The NetApp has been lots of trouble
>> for us....it is in need of a disruptive firmware update, and for all the 
>> money
>> we pay in support...it doesn't cover them coming in to apply the
>> update.  And, they wanted more than what we originally paid for it in support
>> past Nov 25th (still won't get us the new firmware or current problems
>> fixed...)  So we got the Oracle 7420 instead...
> I wouldn't expect netapp or oracle to come onsite to apply firmware for you - 
> I would expect you need a sysadmin to do that.
>

-- 
Who: Lawrence K. Chen, P.Eng. - W0LKC - Senior Unix Systems Administrator
For: Enterprise Server Technologies (EST) -- & SafeZone Ally
Snail: Computing and Telecommunications Services (CTS)
Kansas State University, 109 East Stadium, Manhattan, KS 66506-3102
Phone: (785) 532-4916 - Fax: (785) 532-3515 - Email: [email protected]
Web: http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~lkchen - Where: 11 Hale Library

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