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IBM storage kit keeping admins awake at night

Default software settings see DS series' arrays performance dip in wee hours

Management software for IBM's DS3000, DS4000 and DS5000 series storage arrays is waking sysadmins at 2:00 AM, thanks to an obscure software setting.

As detailed in the Aussie Storage Blog, some versions of the Profile Collector feature in Big Blue's DS Storage Manager package schedules data collections at 2:00AM.

The blog's author, Anthony Vandewerdt, explains why this is a problem:

“Lets assume everyone in your support team installs the Storage Manager on their workstations (which is quite normal) and all of those workstations are still running at 2am (this depends on whether people turn their PCs and laptops off). Multiple requests will come to the storage subsystem too close together, causing performance issues as it tries to process them all at the same time.”

Vandewerdt doesn't mention it, but we imagine if those performance issues cross certain thresholds some organisations could forward them to on-call sysadmins as SMS. And unless you haven't gone to bed yet, who wants an SMS at 2:00AM?

Happily, Vandewerdt points out that the default 2:00 AM data collection setting was only present in a few versions of DS Storage Manager, namely 10.6x.xx or 10.7x.xx, and that switching off Profile Collector will remove the problem. So will upgrading to 10.8x.xx, or making sure you install DS Storage Manager on fewer machines so the arrays don't get grumpy in the wee hours and arrive at alert-worthy performance parameters. ®

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