I’ve previously wrote a howto to upgrade your Isilon cluster’s firmware. The process hasn’t changed much over time: you upload a node firmware package to the cluster, install it, and then apply it to the nodes themselves. Time wise though, it’s not a quick process. Each node will reboot during this process, and the process takes at least 10 minutes per cycle. Imagine a 100+ node cluster and running this process one node at a time…
Fortunately, OneFS 8.2 has recently introduced a nice new tool to make this node firmware upgrade a bit easier and much faster: isi_upgrade_helper. It figures out which nodes can upgrade simultaneously and spits out the relevant commands for you.
One advantage of running your own blog is that you can add an additional post category with the click of a mouse. Welcome to the food category! In this first post, a recipe for ‘Limburgs zoervleisj’, or ‘zuurvlees’ in non-dialect Dutch. Its direct English translation is ‘sour meat’, which originates from the vinegar to marinate and break down the meat. Limburgs zoervleisj is a regional dish originating from my area of the Netherlands, with a sweet and sour taste. Traditionally, it was made from horse meat, which was cheaper than beef. Nowadays though, beef is used as horse meat is scarce and actually more expensive. We typically eat it with chips, but leftovers are often reheated the next day for lunch with some bread.
Veeam presented a couple of new features for their Backup & Recovery suite at Tech Field Day 20. Three of them stand out for me: the Scale-out Backup Repository, Enhanced NAS backup, and Continuous Data Protection. The first one is a logical container to bundle other backup repositories in. The second because backing up large NAS filesystems is hard, especially if you want to maintain a low RPO. And talking about RPO’s, there’s Continuous Data Protection (CDP) which protects your volume or VM with an RPO of seconds. Let’s explore what’s changing and when we can expect to see these features in the field.
Last week I returned from Tech Field Day 20 in Silicon Valley. One of the themes was data visualization: how can you make data easy to consume with handy visualization techniques. The first presentation of week was by SolarWinds, showing the various data visualization products they’ve integrated in the Orion platform since 2014. And it goes quite a bit further than just throwing in a switch for a dark theme and changing an icon left and right, like Apple latest iOS. One of the challenges is that current IT infrastructure is very dynamic. If your monitoring tool can’t cope with this, it will be out of date and useless. Lets explore how SolarWinds solves this.
I’ve owned my Honda VTR 1000 SP2 for about 11 years now, since 2008. Back in 2010, after a bumpy and extended trip in the Swiss Alps and Italian Dolomites, one of my front forks started leaking a bit. I took out the forks, a race shop serviced them, and that was that: brilliant ride quality. 2 years later though, the left leg started slightly leaking again. Not a lot, but you could see a slight oily film on the inner leg. I brought it away for another service, they checked it and replaced the seals again. Fast forward another 3 years and.. yep.