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The old maxim 'You get what you pay for!' applies to this blog. It is neither a support tool nor represents my employer's views. Read the site policies for more information.
© Copyright 2009
The old maxim 'You get what you pay for!' applies to this blog. It is neither a support tool nor represents my employer's views. Read the site policies for more information.
© Copyright 2009
Well, as promised, I spent several days putting together a plan to start rolling out some information and a first pass at Best Practices for OpenVMS. Since I have a subfocus of Storage with OpenVMS, I will start to use that as the launching point. And frankly, it’s one of the most complicated areas to support due to the numerous changes we see in storage technology.
Remember, though I will roll out my first cut at this, I hope this will become a community effort. I will propose various ideas, thoughts and presentations. I will welcome your input. Though I might decide not to include your changes, remember that by sharing your experience you will help other members of the OpenVMS community.
In fact, I offered three different sessions. These include:
I will first present these to the members of the OpenVMS Profession community within HP. Frankly, this will allow me to “dry run” the material before you see it. Then I will offer a more detailed presentation through the HP Technical Online Seminar program.
Then, as I normally do, I will make certain this information will be available through another external distribution mechanism, such as working with the webinar program that the Connect Community organization provides:
http://www.connect-community.org/
So, until I roll more out on that, enjoy. And remember, I welcome your input.
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Undoubtedly life got interesting during the past six to eight months. Long before anyone declared that we were in a recession, we found it was getting harder and harder to generate work. As a result, I had less time to devote to FisherFindings and FisherNotebook.
Unfortunately, on a personal note, this increased stress only amplified health issues for me. My blood pressure went through the roof and my blood sugar suffered. Though I now appear to have those under control, it certainly made me decide to take time to restart this website.
As you can see, I spent the past week revamping FisherFindings. The old WordPress theme tended to Hang. The author of that theme has no further updates. So, I decided to select a new theme and build a new structure for it. My compliments to Inanis at http://www.inanis.net/ . As you can see, he modeled this theme on a well known computer operating system interface. So, it should be fairly easy for you to use and enjoy.
As you can see, you will be able to find the same articles (these posts). Additonally, specific topics will be separated out to new menu items.
Under this menu you will find the stubs for the Best Practice for OpenVMS documents I will help drive through the OpenVMS community. Initially that will include:
I will probably open a Forum Discussion for each of those topic areas. I will also be certain to communicate in HP’s ITRC and the OpenVMS.org website. We should build these Best Practices as an entire community. I will also provide presentations, podcasts, video presentations, and even possibly course material to help present the topics.
You can learn more using the pages and resources under this menu item. These resources will include:
Over time I will develop courses to help enhance the information presented on this website. It will allow you to learn some of the basics, learn where to look for more information and be certain you and others are up to date with you knowledge of OpenVMS storage.
Of course, I will not reinvent FAQs already in place. However, I will add to that knowledgebase already in place. And since it can often be difficult to track down all the locations where FAQs exist, I hope to provide a link to many other sites.
To help facilitate consensus building, we will use a Forum format to capture thoughts and dicussions about Best Practices for OpenVMS Storage.
Of course, another resource are all the links I’ve developed and maintain over the years. This set of pages will help provide you with pointers to other resources.
Polls can be a fun way to see what others think about topics that deal with OpenVMS storage. This page will allow you to see what others think.
Finally, as I build various presentations, courses and such, I create a gather of references. You might find those help you as you learn more about the subject area. This set of pages will provide pointers toward additional background material. Since I use automated tools to check for broken links, I will try to keep all those pointers updated.
Since the FisherFindings website also includes a newsletter service along with it, this set of pages provides an online version of that information. Think of this as one more method to dive into the wealth of information about OpenVMS storage.
Finally, under this menu item you will find site specific information. For example:
Since you probably want to know a little more about me, why I am passionate about OpenVMS storage (of all things!), I provide this brief information about me. You can also find information under my LinkedIn profile.
You will find that I welcome your input, so provide the contact page. Of course, due to spammers it is necessary to provide a “Are You Human?” challenge. As we all do, I wish that step was not necessary. Still, I try to respond as quickly as possible.
Since we live in a litigious society, I provide a set of policies which I use to help drive this website. Though I use a humorous tone in the policies, please understand that I am constrained by what I can and should provide as answers to you in this venue. So remember the maxim: ”You get what you pay for!”.
And of course, what growing site would be complete without a sitemap. This is an automated tool to help you locate information. Of course, since I can move things around on the website fairly easily, I suspect you won’t be the only one using this facility.
Finally, you might be interested in how many users access the website at one time. Unfortunately, a high percentage are due to spammers attempting to access this site and add junk. That takes me back to the policies. If you find junk (or worse) from spammers, just let me know. I will remove it.
So, here’s hoping you enjoy the results of this work. There is a lot of work (late nights) that I put into this. Your input is definitely welcome.
Regards,
=jbf=
John B. Fisher
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Sometimes it is necessary to erase the contents of a volume either before or after it is put into use in an OpenVMS environment. This can be driven by corporate rules and regulations. The need to erase the data can be driven by the need to follow governmental rules and regulations. And as we all know, it can be driven by the need to protect secrets.
Whatever the driving force behind the need to protect the contents of a volume, the use of SAN storage greatly complicates this issue. For example, how do you ensure the data is fully protected from scavenging of data in an environment that might move from location to location? Let’s expand upon this with two different storage array technologies.
EVA Storage Arrays provide virtual RAID volumes. The advantage of this approach is that the volume is automatically spread across as many physical spindles as possible to decrease the utilization of any single spindle and thus decrease the overall response time from all physical spindles.
Unfortunately, this also implies the data will migrate from physical volume to physical volume. What happens if a physical disk fails? Can we guarantee the data on that volume has been properly erased, even if we performed an INITIALIZE/ERASE using the DoD erasure pattern?
Update on 2008/08/10: I put on my thinking cap on this, and realized there are two potential solutions to this issue with the EVA storage arrays. First, the EVA Storage Array can be used to contain similar data. Second, if a mixed environment is needed (such as patient information mixed with user data storage), then a separate disk group to contain the sensitive data can be used. This helps isolate the data within the EVA storage array.
For most sites, destruction of that failed physical spindle would probably suffice. But some sites might need to be able to ascertain the contents of the physical disk. In those situations, virtual raid technology, such as the EVA Storage Arrays might not be the best choice.
For most OpenVMS installations (probably over 98% of them), this is not an issue. However, since many in the OpenVMS community must deal with sensitive data of various levels, it is important to realize this could be an issue.
XP Disk Arrays do offer the chance to better control the contents of the physical volumes. While the data can be spread across numerous physical disks, the assignment of the data to specific physical disks is completely up to the SAN administrator. This would allow a customer, who handles sensitive data, to assign a specific pool of physical disks to handle the sensitive data.
Additionally, you can purchase software to provide Data Shredding for XP Disk Arrays. There are several advantages to this. First, it ensures data presented to various hosts follow corporate / regulatory guidelines. Second, the work is done outside of the host environment. Though INITIALIZE/ERASE with the DoD erasure pattern can do the same, with very large volumes, the time required is extensive. Performing this operation on the array allows the array to completely offload the work from the host.
The following pointers might provide a better understanding of this information.
HP ITRC OpenVMS Forum Discussion about DoD Erasure Pattern Usage
HP StorageWorks XP Data Shredder Software
Finally, if all else fails, turning the physical disk drive into a nonfunctional drive is an option:
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As I previously mentioned, through this blog I will offer presentations I have made over the years. I hope this information will help you.
The following batch of presentations Wes Roberts and I offer to you. It covers several topic areas:
During future blog entries Wes and I will briefly discuss the information within these PowerPoint presentations.
Multimedia Content
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Links
Theory & Practice of Sizing Storage Arrays:
Setup & Management of a SAN with OpenVMS:
Storage Essentials, HSG and MSA Overviews:
Overview of EVA Storage Arrays and XP Disk Arrays:
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It sometimes helps to have one area where you can go to locate pointers to other resources. That is one objective I have with this website. I do a lot of research to help determine how to solve issues with OpenVMS storage. This blog can be a pointer to other resources.
For example, most you already saw the HP Disaster Proof video. It is exciting to see how well OpenVMS did at the detection and recovery from the disaster. But everyone who works with OpenVMS is not surprised. Of course, as you can imagine many people without that experience thought the test was rigged. It was not.
If you have not seen it, you may find the HP Disaster Proof video quite interesting:
While it’s fun to see, this presents an example of how I will share lessons learned through this podcast. In particular, an OpenVMS Disaster Tolerant Cluster can use an Extended SAN.
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Welcome to FisherFindings! As you can see, I redid this website to solve some problems with WordPresss and other plugin tools. Sorry for any inconvenience. Hopefully this will be ready to rock and roll. I have several posts that I will make this week. So, hopefully you will find it helpful.
So, what is this blog all about?
Mission Statement
The blog title says it all. This blog attempts to transfer my lessons learned about OpenVMS Storage issues to the rest of the OpenVMS community.
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