Resolutions for a Life Well-Lived

I ran across these resolutions today by author and professor Clyde Kilby.  Great resolutions for sanity and a life well-lived. 

1. At least once every day I shall look steadily up at the sky and remember that I, a consciousness with a conscience, am on a planet traveling in space with wonderfully mysterious things above and about me.

2. Instead of the accustomed idea of a mindless and endless evolutionary change to which we can neither add nor subtract, I shall suppose the universe guided by an Intelligence which, as Aristotle said of Greek drama, requires a beginning, a middle and an end. I think this will save me from the cynicism expressed by Bertrand Russell before his death, when he said: “There is darkness without, and when I die there will be darkness within. There is no splendour, no vastness anywhere, only triviality for a moment, and then nothing.”

3. I shall not fall into the falsehood that this day, or any day, is merely another ambiguous and plodding twenty-four hours, but rather a unique event, filled, if I so wish, with worthy potentialities. I shall not be fool enough to suppose that trouble and pain are wholly evil parentheses in my existence but just as likely ladders to be climbed toward moral and spiritual manhood.

4. I shall not turn my life into a thin straight line which prefers abstractions to reality. I shall know what I am doing when I abstract, which of course I shall often have to do.

5. I shall not demean my own uniqueness by envy of others. I shall stop boring into myself to discover what psychological or social categories I might belong to. Mostly I shall simply forget about myself and do my work.

6. I shall open my eyes and ears. Once every day I shall simply stare at a tree, a flower, a cloud, or a person. I shall not then be concerned at all to ask what they are but simply be glad that they are. I shall joyfully allow them the mystery of what Lewis calls their “divine, magical, terrifying and ecstatic” existence.

7. I shall sometimes look back at the freshness of vision I had in childhood and try, at least for a little while, to be, in the words of Lewis Carroll, the “child of the pure unclouded brow, and dreaming eyes of wonder.”

8. I shall follow Darwin’s advice and turn frequently to imaginative things such as good literature and good music, preferably, as Lewis suggests, an old book and timeless music.

9. I shall not allow the devilish onrush of this century to usurp all my energies but will instead, as Charles Williams suggested, “fulfill the moment as the moment.” I shall try to live well just now because the only time that exists is now.

10. Even if I turn out to be wrong, I shall bet my life on the assumption that this world is not idiotic, neither run by an absentee landlord, but that today, this very day, some stroke is being added to the cosmic canvas that in due course I shall understand with joy as a stroke made by the architect who calls himself Alpha and Omega.

Recommended Cache Settings for VNX

I know there has been some discussion around what cache values to use for new VNX arrays.  I stumbled upon a nice EMC primus article (emc267304) the other day which does a good job addressing these questions. The most helpful thing to remember, in my opinion, is to allocate 10 percent of the cache to read and allocate the rest for writes.  You should always keep read cache between 256 MB and a maximum of 1024 MB.  Therefore, EMC recommends the following read cache configurations for the different VNX models.

• 5100 – 256MB
• 5300 – 400MB
• 5500 – 700MB
• 5700 – 1024MB
• 7500 – 1024MB

RecoverPoint Fake Volume Size Error

UPDATE: It does appear that 3.3SP1 and newer versions of RecoverPoint support larger replica volumes using the CX splitter, however FLARE 30 or above is required.  If using any FLARE code prior to 30 then source and target volumes must be identical regardless of the RecoverPoint version.

I’ve ran into this a couple of times recently where the CLARiiON splitter throws an error when trying to use a target LUN that is larger than the source.  It appears that the CX splitter only supports source and replica LUNs of identical size.  According to EMC primus 203095, fabric and host splitters do support a larger target LUN. This only applies if FLARE has not yet been upgraded to 30.  FLARE 30 and RP3.3SP1 or above is required to use larger replica LUNs with the CX splitter. I’m definitely partial to using the array splitter due to performance and ease of use so this is a pretty big limitation from my perspective.  I would be interested to hear if EMC is planning to have future array splitters support larger target LUNs.

A Simple Look at Parity

Data is important and so is processing and protecting that data efficiently.  Almost everyone in the storage world today depends on a simple, yet ingenious method of protecting their data without having to fully duplicate it.  We are able to do this through the use of parity.  A lot of us take parity for granted and some of us have neglected to actually understand how calculating parity works because we think it’s too complex.  What I would like to show here is that parity isn’t quite as complicated as you might think.

So what is parity? Here is an attempt to give my own definition. Simply put, as far as storage and certain RAID levels are concerned, parity is the sum of all blocks in a stripe. This parity data that is calculated can be used to recalculate a lost portion of the stripe.

Let’s take RAID 5 for example.  With RAID 5, data is striped across all drives in the RAID set.  Each stripe uses one drive for parity.  The data on this drive is the sum of all the data from the other drives in the RAID set in this particular stripe.  It may be easier to understand this if you think in terms of Base-10 which I will use as an example in this post. In actuality these calculations are based on the boolean XOR function, so I’m dumbing it down a bit here.  Consider the table below. In this example we are looking at one stripe which crosses 5 disks and uses the 5th disk to store the parity data.

So, in this example 12+14+10+20=56

Now let’s say you lost Disk 2.  If you were to subtract the total value of the remaining disks from the value in disk 5, you would get the value for Disk 2.

12+10+20=42,  56-42=14

There you go.  Using elementary mathematics, we’ve shown how you can protect enterprise data while saving significantly on the amount of required storage.

A couple things to note.  With RAID 5, you can only lose 1 disk.  You can see we would not have enough information to recalculate the data if we lost two disks at the same time.  Also, each stripe will alternate which drive is used for parity which works to help increase performance.

Is it really that simple?  Well, to be honest, no…  The concept is that simple but to apply it to binary data you have to take it a little further.  Remember XOR that I mentioned earlier?  The XOR function applied to binary will give similar results as when addition is applied to Base-10.

In summary, this post was just to lay out a very basic concept around how parity calculations work and to hopefully interest you in diving deeper into it.  There are already great posts out there that describe RAID and parity in more detail.  This is a really good article that goes into more detail on both parity and RAID 5: http://www.scottklarr.com/topic/23/how-raid-5-really-works/

Staying Focused and Staying Involved

It’s Spring time again, well actually, it’s almost Summer.  Crazy to think how the seasons start to blur together the more we have on our plate.  Warm weather has always been a distraction for me and I struggle every year to stay focused on nice sunny days.  This year is no ordinary year, however.  My wife and I are expecting our first child this August and somehow all my free time between now and then is already booked solid between family events and things that need to get done around the house for the new addition.

So, needless to say, I’ve been pondering a lot on how to stay focused on daily tasks that need to be carried out quickly and efficiently.  How do I keep up the same pace that my friends and co-workers trust me to be capable of?  And just as important, how do I stay involved in my current relationships and continue to build new ones?  It’s a daunting task because the more I put on my plate, the more out of touch I feel with the people around me.  What I need most now isn’t less contact with others but more.  I need the help, support, and energy that are often the result of strong relationships with friends, clients, and co-workers.

Here are a few bullet points for ideas I have around staying focused and staying involved.  Any advice and/or opinions are always welcome.

• Keep up as much personal communication as possible.  It’s easier to just send a a quick e-mail when really busy but e-mail usually disconnects me from people more than it helps to stay in touch.  Meet someone in person or get them on the phone whenever possible.  It keeps things real.
• Change your surroundings.  Do you work from the same office in your house every day?  Try working from a different room or even a coffee shop from time to time.  If not working from home, then try different routes driving into work.  When I change things up like this it helps me stay focused and interested in what I’m doing and helps fight burn out.
• Rest. Resting isn’t as easy as it sounds and is probably the most important thing you can do to stay focused.  Resting not only means taking a break but it also means “not worrying”! This isn’t easy to do.  Often times when taking a vacation or relaxing on the weekend, I will stress and worry about current and upcoming tasks.  If you can build up the confidence and trust to truly take a break, turn off the stress, and rest, nothing else will energize you more or make you more efficient at your job and your duties at home.
• Listen.  It may sound counter-intuitive, but nothing helps me refocus like listening and focusing on what others have to share.  If someone is opening up to me about problems or successes in their own life, I want to listen.  Self absorption quickly leads to burn out and feelings of frustration.  The more I concentrate on others and the less I think of myself always makes me a happier person and gives me much needed perspective. Be genuine though, fake interest has the opposite effect.
• Point the finger at yourself. This also sounds counter-intuitive but if done the right way can definitely help you focus.  With almost any problem you encounter there’s something you can learn from and do better, even if the problem’s not your fault.  It’s good to hold people accountable but blame shifting is a major issue today and wastes a significant amount of time.  Problems are an opportunity to learn and do better.  Even if you didn’t cause the problem, admit that you’re a stakeholder in the problem and identify areas you can improve.  People who think they don’t make mistakes never get better.  They remain stationary and will quickly fall behind.  Quit wasting time pointing fingers at others and start working immediately on how to make things better.

EMC Failback Plugin for Celerra Replicator

One of the pains around VMware SRM that has existed for quite a while now is the lack of failback functionality.  SRM does a great job of failing us over to another site in an automated fashion.  But what happens after disaster is over?  What if you were just testing your DR facility and now you want to failback?  Luckily, EMC has taken the initiative to provide a solution for many of their replication products.  I’ve personally implemented EMC Failback Plugins for Celerra Replicator and Recoverpoint. In this post I’m covering the failback plugin for Celerra Replicator. 

Setting up the plugin is a snap if you know the requirements.  I blindly jumped in to the install and missed one very important thing… The plugin only supports 32-bit editions of Windows.  I was running vSphere 4.1 on 64bit vcenter when first tried to install the pluing on the vcenter server. The plugin menu immediately started showing errors and there was no way to actually enable the plugin.

Next step was to install on a 32-bit server and point to the vcenter server that I wanted to utilize the plugin on.  Again I started seeing immediate results in the plugin window, however, this time no errors! The configuration was quick and painless.  I had to enter login creds to the celerra and vcenter server of both the protected site and the failover site.  You are then given the option to scan for any failed over datastores.  You get a few granular failback options as well.  Mainly the ability to pick and choose which datastores you want to failback and whether or not to power on the vm again after failback.  I’m including a few screenshots below.

Are You A Risk Taker?

Are you a risk taker? How often do you take risks?  In the IT world and the highly sought after “0 downtime environment”, risk taking is often discouraged.  This is understandable to a degree but are there areas where we can take reasonable risks in order to further our productivity?  I believe so and I’ll try and explain in this post why I feel that risk taking can have its advantages.

I just finished reading the book “Delivering Happiness” by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh.  Tony mentions in his book how risk taking is encouraged at Zappos and that it is even mixed into their core values and culture.  It’s part of embracing and driving change in your environment because what worked yesterday will not necessarily work today, and what works tomorrow will probably change from what works today.  It’s a super fast pace world out there and in order to keep up we have to take risks. 

One of the ways I take risks personally is with my time.  Time is not only money for me but it also means quality time with family and loved ones.  Some things I do on a daily basis are tedious but necessary.  I’m always looking for ways to make these tasks easier and automated.  Kind of a “Work Smarter, not Harder” attitude.  How can I apply this to risk taking?  There are many times that I will spend more time trying to find a more efficient process to complete a task than it would take to just finish the task the normal way.  This is a risk because I’m investing a lot of my time trying to find new processes.  It doesn’t always pay off either.  Sometimes I’m unable to find a faster process and I’ve wasted those hours and now I have nothing to show for it.  Other times, I do find the more efficient process I was seeking and it cuts down my task completion time considerably.  It’s a risk, but in the long run it almost always pays off for me, so I believe it’s a risk worth taking. 

Of course, not all risks are worth it.  I like to think of it as healthy and unhealthy risk taking.  Any time you start cutting corners, I would call this unhealthy risk taking.  What you risk from cutting corners is often whether or not something blows up due to your lack of due diligence and more important, you’re risking your credibility.  Don’t ever disadvantage someone else in order to get ahead. 

On the other hand, I would define a risk as healthy when it coincides with a healthy, determined and passionate desire to make things better.  Be smart about it and always consider how your risk might impact others.  One of the most healthy risks (and possibly the hardest) is to disadvantage yourself for the benefit of the team.  It may seem you’re losing out in the short term, but in the grand scheme of things it builds trust and shows character, commitment, and compassion towards your team members.

These things can be applied to almost all aspects of life and healthy risk taking is something I try to improve on not only at work but in my personal life as well.  Change is good, it’s how we get better, and we have to drive that change by taking risks.

The Problem with Success

I can see myself already starting to lose credibility with many readers just as they read the title of this post.  I can hear many ask, “What’s wrong with being successful, isn’t that The American Dream”?  I want to make to make it clear up front that I’m not implying success in and of itself is a bad thing, I just want to show that there’s a problem with it.

My question to you is this: Do you gauge all or part of your self worth based on how successful you are?  Does your success define you?

I think we would all have to admit that at some point in our lives we define our value and our worth by our ability to be successful.  The inherent issue with this is simple.  If my self worth is based on my success then it has to also be true for me to believe that I’m worth more as a person than someone who is less successful than myself.  There’s also a danger of starting look down on others who have not prospered as we have.  Of course, we don’t consciously think about this but if we look deep down we’re all trying to prove at sometime or another that we’re not bums. But someone has to be the bum, right?

Sometimes I think to myself “I’m so lucky to have landed in the IT sector where there are endless opportunities for success!”.  But how fortunate am I really if I haven’t learned to truly value others around me inside and outside of my career.  I can only be a great addition to my team at work and to my family at home when I have true concern and understanding for others whom I interact with who may be higher or lower than me in terms of achievement. 

So how do we truly value others?  We have to begin by realizing that we haven’t necessarily earned our success. Those of us who are quick learners did not earn that ability, we were just born with it and we should be ever thankful for it.  There are many other examples but I won’t get into it here.  The main point is, if we realize that we should be thankful for at least part of our success and that we did not earn it, then we’ll be at least a little humbled and start to show more compassion towards others. 

Now for the drum roll.  How does all of this affect our ability to perform? In short, it’s how the strongest most productive teams are built. I had the fortunate opportunity to take part in a day of leadership training this week provided by a highly esteemed and highly effective consultant group which helped inspire me to write this post.  The main focus was on team building and how important it is to value your team members and customers.  I wanted to take it another level and show that we can’t truly value others if we define ourselves purely on our success.  Success can be addictive and even harmful just like any other addiction.  It can cost you your health and your family if left unchecked. It can even cost you your integrity if you start making decisions that hurt others in order to get ahead. So make sure to invest in others and humble yourself in your career.  You may be a Rock Star but you didn’t get there by yourself and most likely you were born with gifts and talents that you didn’t earn so give back some of your success to those you live and work with.

And to take it even another step higher, I also believe there’s a great opportunity for businesses to give back and invest more in our communities.  If businesses really value their teams, their customers, and their people then they’ll value their city too.  There’s been a mass exodus over the past century from our cities towards suburbia and I have to admit I’ve done this as well.  Instead of trying to run away from poverty in our cities let’s work together with our businesses to make our cities a better place to live.