Posts by Hans De Leenheer

I have been a System Engineer for some years and one of the scariest traditions was Holiday Season patching. In short it means that a lot of companies still think its ok to keep the systems an entire year running and do ALL patches (firmware, OS, software) in the week between Christmas and New Year. More often than not that did not turn out to be the best experience as 'something' will break. I cannot recall a single holiday season that the patching projects went actually better than planned. What I do recall are the Christmas or New Year's eves that we were troubleshooting or recovering from previous versions.

There are 3 stages in the ... Read more

SAN snapshots are the fastest way to secure your data, especially if you are using offloading API's like VAAI. So since it is fast and the timeframe is small, some people want to use san snapshots as a backup procedure. There are a few issues here; the first issue is that if you want a longer retention, you will need to keep all your snapshots online and this will take too much precious production data in your tier1 storage array. The second issue is that a lot of SAN products today still don't like working full-time on top of nested snapshotted LUNs.