About 7 or 8 months ago we installed two 3-node Isilon clusters at a hospital destined to host PACS data. Since then it’s all quiet on the Isilon front: no hardware failures, no performance problems. No complaints there of course, but also.. slightly.. boring. FINALLY, a couple of days ago the Isilon sent us an email. “Device disconnected. Boot mirror is critical. Unhealthy Isilon boot disk. Mirror is degraded.” That kind of stuff. Woohoo, ACTION!
Once your Isilon cluster is up and running you’ll want to keep an eye on it. A piece of software that’s extremely useful to monitor both performance and capacity usage is InsightIQ. Very easy to set-up, it’s extremely powerful both in pro-active and reactive monitoring scenarios. Either sit back and watch the scheduled reports land in your mailbox or take a more active approach and drill down to find the source of a performance problem. Let’s explore further!
In my previous posts I’ve discussed how to rack and stack your Isilon and how to get it powered up and running. With the Isilon systems operational it was time to put them into production and start the PACS data migration to Isilon. Which is actually easier than you might think!
Yesterday we racked and stacked the EMC Isilon systems, prepared most of the cabling and pretty much prepared to start the Isilon systems. Which is pretty uneventful if you consider we’ve been dragging along hundreds of kilograms of equipment all day yesterday… The whole process can be pretty much split in four parts: configure the cluster and initial node, join the remaining nodes, configure the network, configure the rest.
I’m currently contracted by a customer that has been experiencing chronic capacity and performance issues in their storage environment. After analyzing the environment and writing an advisory report we got to work and started correcting and improving many aspects of the storage systems. One component of this overhaul is installing a pair of new Isilon systems which will store PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) data generated by the radiology department. The planning and design phase took place over the last couple of months, in which we involved both internal IT people and external resources such as the PACS vendor and the suppliers. All said, discussed and done: the actual implementation of the Isilon systems is scheduled for this week. Today: Isilon rack and stack!