Storage Tiering is nothing new. We use fast 15K RPM disks for high performance applications, slower 10K RPM disks for less demanding applications, and 7.2K RPM SATA disks for archive storage. Recently, solid state disks (SSDs) have also become more common for really high performance needs. The trick is managing it all. Two or…

As I originally blogged, I was hoping to use EMC snapshots to perform server-less/network-less backups…
To make a long story short, Replication Manager is useless for LUNs with ZFS. According to EMC, this won’t change in the near future. PowerSnap also has no support for taking snapshots of LUNs with ZFS on them so basically…

While the data sheet claims support for Solaris, there are several caveats which I have run into.

1. There is no mention of ZFS support in the data sheet and apparently, there is no support in the software either. One would expect this to be a non-question since ZFS has been part…

You may say, “It only takes me 3 hours to do a full backup of everything”, but over time backup windows are notorious for becoming too small. Backups are split over multiple days, technologies upgraded, etc. When planning a backup strategy, my approach is to eliminate the backup window altogether- that is do whatever…

I’ve been working with Unix for a fairly long time now- about 13 years. I’ll admit that I started with Linux and thought it was light years ahead of SunOS 4.x running on those old SPARC machines- I mean who had heard of SPARC processors? I remember my boss trying to explain to me…