Compellent PSCS One-Liner Coding: Tip #2

With Compellent Storage Center 5, you have the ability to control whether an alert is generated for individual servers when connectivity changes.

This means when your server reboots or you switch around cables (in your lab environment of course), these alerts are triggered and show up in the system alerts as well as the GUI which presents a “stop light” that isn’t green.

You can control this connectivity per server in the Storage Center Manager, or perhaps you want to disable it for all of your lab servers.  Here’s a simple way to do so.  In this example I take the servers that are in my folder on the Storage Center and turn off their connectivity alerts.

Get-SCServer -ConnectionName SC5 | ?{ $_.ParentFolder -eq "Justin" } | { Set-SCServer -Index $ _.Index -EnableConnectivityAlert:$false -ConnectionName SC5 }

Beginner hints: The usage of “?” in PowerShell is synonymous with “where”.  We use this to filter the Get-SCServer cmdlet in the above example.  Additionally, “%” is synonymous with “for-each”, also used in the example.

Compellent PSCS One-Liner Coding: Tip #1

The Compellent Storage Center provides in-depth reporting, alerting, and monitoring as part of the platform.  It’s very important for Storage Administrators to monitor and review the alerts (informational or otherwise) that might be generated on their Storage Center.

By design, alerts in the Storage Center will change the “stop-light” status from green to red, especially critical alerts where, for example, a component is malfunctioning or a path between the controllers and disk are down.  It is also by design that these alerts have to be acknowledged one-by-one in the Storage Center interface.

That being said, there are times when you might be performing some configuration changes or maintenance that could trigger alerts.  Having to acknowledge 10 alerts is one thing, but lets say you replaced a switch, and lets say there are now 50 alerts.  How can I acknowledge those quickly and easily using the Compellent Storage Center PowerShell Command Set?

Like this:

Get-SCAlert -ConnectionName SC12 | foreach {Acknowledge-SCAlert -Index $_.Index -ConnectionName SC12}

This will get a list of alerts from the connection I have previously saved using the Get-SCConnection cmdlet.  We then pipe that to the Acknowledge-SCAlert cmdlet which then acknowledges the alert on the Storage Center.  I just cleared my 50 alerts in less than a minute!

NOTE: It really is important to review the alerts that your system might be generating.  Use all script examples with caution.

Windows Phone 7 GSM Only at Launch?

Kind of a bummer for Verizon and Sprint customers who were hoping to have one of those new Windows Phone 7 devices in time for the holidays. 

Initial reports indicate that Microsoft will delay the launch of an OS that will support CDMA technology in order to focus on GSM.  This is probably for good reason as CDMA is widely used in the United States, but not much at all beyond that.  GSM is the predominate technology overseas and in other foreign countries.

That being said, AT&T and T-Mobile would be the first to offer the devices, while Spring and Verizon customers will have to wait till sometime in 2011, when CDMA support is rumored to be made available.

"We had to make some trade-offs," senior product manager Greg Sullivan told CNET today. "Even Microsoft doesn’t have unlimited resources. We had to prioritize doing fewer things, really, really well." (Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13860_3-20016752-56.html#ixzz102lPKtPl)

Seattle Tech Field Day

I’m still getting caught up on events, so I thought I’d share with you a little about our participation in the 2010 Tech Field Day held in Seattle, WA. 

Back in the middle of July, Compellent had an opportunity to participate in Gestalt IT Tech Field Day.  As it says on their website, “This unique event brings together innovative IT product vendors and independent thought leaders, allowing them to get to know one another. It is a forum for engagement, education, hands-on experience, and feedback.”

Compellent was thrilled to be part of the experience as one of five sponsors for this event.  Others included F5, NEC, Veeam, and Nimble Storage, who used Tech Field Day as their official launch.

The event focused around these different vendors who had the opportunity to present their technologies to an esteemed panel of delegates.  The delegates, which comprised of technologists and bloggers, came from around the world.

The evening of July 15th included a reception and dinner at the Boeing Museum of Flight.  This was about the coolest thing I’ve seen.  I have a love for aviation, but to see where some of the first aircraft were built was simply amazing. 

The welcome reception was held in the “Red Barn”.  This is the original Boeing airplane factory.  The smell of the wood barn interior makes you feel like you were there.  Seeing the woodshop tools that were used to create the different components of the flying machine was pretty cool.

This was an opportunity for us to meet the other vendors in attendance, but more importantly to meet all of the delegates and learn more about them and what they do.  Liem Nguyen, the director of Corporate Communications for Compellent helped to coordinate Compellent’s sponsorship and involvement, and is seen below with Kirby Wadsworth, a marketing exec with F5 Networks.  You can’t tell from this picture, but Kirby was rockin’ some pretty sweet yellow slacks that night.

Most of the delegates in one form or another were involved in IT, but specifically this Tech Field Day was focused on virtualization.  So, the basis of what we talked about centered around our virtualized storage solution, but also the integration points with Hyper-V and VMware.

Bob Fine, Director of Product Marketing, Scott DesBles, Director of Technical Solutions, and myself tag-teamed to present the Compellent solution.  Bob and Scott provided the Compellent overview and a roadmap discussion which seemed to keep the panel engaged, and we also discussed Live Volume while demonstrating the Compellent Storage Center and its ease of use in addition to Enterprise Manager, the “single pane of glass” which can be used to manage multiple Storage Centers in your environment and the interface that enables the world-famous “6 clicks to replicate a volume’”. 

Check out Liem’s blog post about Tech Field Day with some exclusive interview footage of the delegates and shots from the Museum of Flight.

We had a blast meeting with the delegates and other vendors in Seattle.  We’d love the opportunity to do this again and continue to share the Compellent story.

Did I mention the view in Seattle?  For this last picture, I was amazed at how close the parking lot was to the runway at Boeing Field.  We were able to get some great photos and videos of the experience.  Here’s a nice shot of a cargo aircraft on approach with Mount Rainer in the distance.

Panoramics from the 2010 Minnesota State Fair

I was having a little fun with my new phone, the Samsung Epic 4G and discovered that there is a panoramic mode built into the camera.  I experimented a little and think for a 5MP camera on a phone, that I actually got some pretty good results.  What do you think?

Ellie took her first ride on the Giant Slide this year.  The picture above was from Saturday, September 4, which happened to be a record setting day with over 234,000 people visiting the Minnesota State Fair.  You can tell by the amount of people that it was indeed packed.  KISS was the Grandstand act that night.  Need I say more?

This panoramic was from Friday, September 3.  The weather was cloudy with chilly temperatures in the upper 50’s.  In addition to the chilly weather, winds were out of the north at about 20 MPH which made it barely tolerable.  Check back with me in January to validate that last statement.  I like this photo particularly because it captures the main gate to the Minnesota State Fair on Snelling Avenue.

Finally, I had to throw in a shot of the Midway from Saturday.  I shot this normally in pretty bright sunlight and used a preset in Aperture to add a high-dynamic range effect.  If you’re not familiar, you can learn more about HDR here.

Not a panoramic, but definitely a great memory from this year’s Fair.  Ellie experienced her first merry-go-round.  She was a little nervous at first, but once it got going she was laughing and waving at the on-lookers as she went by (over and over again).