Thought I would just take a little trip down memory lane.

Now I wasn't even born when this picture was taken but there are plenty of ancient historical images where this was taken from. I did see some of the my earlier computers on this site, along with an old TRS-80, IBM Personal Computer, and the heaviest laptop I ever had: an Hewlett-Packard Integral PC. Boy does that take me back.

There is some great information on this site if you didn't live back in the 40's or just can't remember how we made the jump from abacus to calculators. Or maybe you're interested in how WWII brought about advancements in computers.

I think computer history is something we can all appreciate. After all, have you ever actually seen an ENIAC?

So take a time warp, go look at some very heavy computers at www.computerhistory.org and then go lift your laptop. I am sure glad for technological advancement.

Going to and from the office you just realize you left your USB drive on the desk. Thoughts of theft by the cleaning crew quickly rush through your head. So you turn around in traffic and when you get to the office you can't seem to find that blasted USB drive. Your frantically search your briefcase, pockets, and everywhere else you can imagine. Only to realize you have lost your most precious tool that contains hours of sensitive data. And now you don't know who has it and what they will do with your information.

Now jumps in JumpVault. A software application that can create a secure container for your data stored on a variety of personal devices (USB Flash Drives, Mobile Phones, Blackberry Devices, Palms, etc.). Now if your devices get lost, stolen, or eaten by fido you can rest assured that the data isn't being seen by Sluggo.

As an additional feature, JumpVault provides an internet option to upload to their remote security system and accessable when all is lost and you can't seem to find your personal device.

Take a look at www.jumpvault.com. I just wish they would change their website :).

Anyone ever get off their duff and go to one of these? I would enjoy hearing your comments.

It somewhat amazes me to read in the opening line for this particular show that "storage managers are still struggling with many of the same issues..".

So what issues are you struggling with?

• Is it plain o'l volume of data?
• Is it backing up that massive database?
• Is it speed of I/O response?
• Is it getting your hands around architecture?
• Is it off-site storage?

Now is the time to sound off!

This show is supposed to adress what is on your mind so I am curious if you ever went, what you learned, and most importantly if it changed your IT strategy.

I really want to know as it sounds good and without anything coming to my city I am thinking about traveling. After all they are free to qualified candidates.

See: The Storage Show

In the last couple of posts I pointed you to some very useful on-line demos. I personally enjoy demos because I can sit back, have a cup of coffee, and let someone else do the typing. They are nice to get a general feel for something.

Well, now is the time to get down and dirty. Roll up your sleeves and try a bunch of ZFS commands with a demonstration tutorial put out by Sun.

• Included in this tutorial:
• ZFS Command Summary
• Setting Up ZFS is Easy
• Creating a ZFS Storage Pool
• Creating a ZFS File System
• Adding Disks to a ZFS Storage Pool
• Using Redundant ZFS Configurations
• Managing ZFS is Easy
• Adding Additional ZFS File Systems
• Setting Reservations on a ZFS File System
• Setting Quotas on a ZFS File System
• Sharing ZFS File Systems
• ZFS Snapshots forData Recovery
• ZFS Property Inheritance
• Transferring ZFSData
• Transforming ZFSData (Compression)
• AdvancedManagement (ZFS Clones)
• Migrating ZFS Storage Pools
• ReplacingDevices in Your ZFS Storage Pool
• Scrubbing a ZFS Storage Pool
• ZFS Checksum Recovery
• Using ZFS with Solaris Zones
• Using ZFS Volumes

So go to ZFS DemonstrationTutorial

Another quick little demo showing the self healing feature with ZFS.

In this demo you are quickly taken through how ZFS can recover from data corruption in mirrored volumes. The demo first starts by creating a storage pool comprised of two disks in a mirror, they take a quick look at that mirrored pair health. The demo then proceeds to corrupt the mirrored pair by writing random data to one of the disks to simulate massive data corruption.

Now what I thought was cool, they then checked the health of the mirrored pair and everything was still in a healthy state. This was because everything was stil in memory cache so the system didn't notice the corruption on disk.

The demo then forced a flush of the cache. To my surprise, when they looked again at the health of the mirrored pair, there was no corruption. How could this be?

This is where I was impressed. When checking the status of the pool, a message status was shown that stated there were devices that experienced an unrecoverable error. AND there was given an action item for us to perform, basically to see if we needed to replace the device. A scrub was done to clean the errors. The demo also will take you through a quick replacement for the corrupted disk through resilvering.

This demo, while there is no audio is quick to go through and will get you acclimated to some of ZFS's features.

Go to Self Healing with ZFS to watch this demo.

Want to see ZFS in a 5 minute demo?

The following demo by Dan Price will show you some of the basics in using ZFS. This video will take you through using some ZFS commands with regard to:

• createing a storage pool without having to format, fdisk, or make slices on the disk
• creating filesystems that share the same storage pool
• On the fly unmount and mount
• creating a large sample file and watch the i/o going through that file
• adding more disk to the storage pool, and immediately seeing how current write activity starts using the newly added disk
• limiting a user or group of users usage of a filesystem through quotas
• usage of compression on a storage pool
• creating a snapshot and how to access
• using a shell script to create a 100 filesystems in 20 seconds

Take a look at the short video here: ZFS Basics Demo