byrona ✭✭✭✭✭

My biggest frustration with storage continues to be the software management tools that are provided by the storage vendors. In my (relatively small) experience with storage systems, all of the hardware vendors really seem to struggle to create good software for managing their systems. I almost think it would better if the…

Great Story! One of the challenges is getting people to bring us problems instead of solutions. The guy in your story brought you a solution, not a problem. The issue with this is he was not equipped with enough data to be proposing a solution, before you jump to a solution you need to fully understand the problem you are…

Brilliant Jerks to me are like potential energy that can't be tapped, in other words Useless! I have worked with several of them in my career and at the end of the day they never last. It drives me crazy to see when companies can't let their services stand on their own but instead need to like about them being the first,…

Definitely need this also.

Testing a BC/DR plan is a really difficult thing without actually doing a failover of some sort. We just recently worked with a client that wanted to do some DR testing; however, the test plan I saw was designed to test it without actually doing it so many of the allowances made in the plan altered it in such a way that…

I think VMAN certainly stands to solve a lot of problems for an on-prem virtualized datacenter, we actually just purchased the product and I will begin deployment plans next week. With that being said, VMAN's capabilities now need to be expanded to cover similar functionality for public cloud to support a Hybrid solution…

One of the challenges is that folks <cough> Management <cough> often significantly underestimates the amount of time that goes into managing and maintaining backups for a relatively large set of systems; especially when you have multiple different backup methods that are being managed. I have seen where the management of…

Awesome documentation Nicole; thanks!

Thus far this is not really possible. The best you can do currently is create a User Defined Group and add all of the system names associated with a site. You can then create a saved search where part of the criteria for the search is that User Defined Group as the Source Machine.

Frankly it surprises me that folks are so surprised when it comes to light that Facebook has all of your information and others were able to access it. If you go out of your way to put all of the information about your life on a website it's only a matter of time before it's mined by others. Not sure if anybody watched or…

This was a super awesome event and the venue was amazing! I had a fantastic time presenting and really hope to have the opportunity to do it again!

Sure thing! For example I want to be able to specify all of the services we are responsible for managing (we are a service provider) for each node in Orion. Currently to accomplish this I would need a custom property for each service we could manage and have it be a yes/no field. For example the following fields would be…

We use SharePoint as part of 0365 and I have a NetPath running to that and it's pretty clean, every now and again I will see a red (no data) poll but I honestly haven't been able to verify if that is a problem on my end or somewhere else. With that being said we also have direct peering with the Six up in Seattle so we…

Well, SQL will reserve it all, not necessarily actually use it all. This is where tools like AppInsight for SQL and/or DPA can come in really handy because they will show you if SQL is experiencing memory pressure or not. My recommendation CourtesyIT​ would be to use one of those tools (even if it is a 30 day evaluation)…

Great thought provoking post! I think this is where having human analysts can come in really handy. While humans are certainly more prone to error in addition to the most costly resource you have, they also happen to be the best at identifying "things that look out of place". The human analysts combined with some good data…

This is some crazy awesome integration. I am would love to see the same type of thing for Storage Manager. Nice work guys!

Up until recently we have been a VMWare shop and going forward we are moving into Azure Stack so there isn't any OpenStack in my foreseeable future.

Yeah, that is problematic. We got around that with PCI by getting an additional poller just dedicated to the PCI environment; it was an expensive pill to swallow.

I think automatic is great unfortunately it's often use with the wrong goal in mind. People often seek to automate to make things faster and ultimately reduce the resources necessary to do it. Automation often doesn't lessen the resources necessary to complete the task. Before you automate you need to make sure you fully…

When you end up with silos and teams not working together I largely blame management for this problem. Every time I have seen this and have dug into the problem I find that management hasn't really done anything to solve the problem but is inadvertently doing things to support the silos. Just telling people to work…

I have also found an issue on at least on occasion where the upgrade advisor was not accurate in the path that it provided.

We get DDoS'ed often enough or more importantly I should say our clients get DDoS'ed and therefore we do by proxy as we are a service provider. We have been relatively successful at mitigating the attacks though I couldn't tell you details on how it's done as that is typically handled by our Sr. Network Engineers. I do…

Sounds like a regular Rob Boss!

rschroeder​ I am using the latest version. I want a way to just export the config, execute a script and have the configuration automatically distributed to all of the other Kiwi servers. I am trying to avoid the need to go import it to each Kiwi server manually. If it's just a matter of copying a file to a specified…

And that is if you are only using VMWare; we use both VMWare and Hyper-V so having the right tools in place like VMAN is absolutely necessary to manage these types of enviornments.

The game and headset were enough to get me to spend some of my points for the first time ever!

I wasn't aware of HSL until reading this. I guess I am curious to better understand the use case? What additional useful data do you get that isn't already available without all of the additional logs?

I am actually in the process of implementing WebHelpDesk for our company now. What I have learned over the years about Help Desk software is that it's important to take the time to understand how it's naturally designed to handle flow and work with that flow, not against it. With previous implementations we have tried to…

I am not clear on if this post is about the important process of asking questions or if the purpose is to generate a list of questions regarding database performance?

We also just implemented SRM and it's an amazing product. Storage systems are notorious for being challenging to work with and providing terrible monitoring interfaces. Having this data in Orion where I anybody (not just the storage admins) can access it has been a huge benefit.