Co-op works out CHARON IO differences
July 2, 2014
Editor's note: Starting tomorrow it's a business holiday week's-end here in the US, so we are taking a few days to relax in a family reunion on the waters of a very well known Bay. We'll be back at our reporting on Monday.
At the Dairylea Cooperative in the Northeastern US, moving away from classic HP 3000 hardware to CHARON meant a bit of a learning curve. But the changes were something that even had a few blessings in disguise.
Moving files via FTP from the retired HP 3000 would be quicker and easier, said IT Director Jeff Elmer, "but of course it would require the physical box to be on the network. Getting our DLT 8000s to work with the emulator required some research, and some trial and error, but once you know the quirks and work around them, it’s actually quite reliable,” he said.
A new disaster recovery server had to be acquired. Dairylea purchased a ProLiant server identical to the one running what Elmer calls “our production emulator,” The DR emulator is installed it in the same city where the physical HP 3000 DR box was, complete with tape drives. Stromasys supplies a USB key for the DR emulator as part of the support fees; the key contains HPSUSAN and HPCPUNAME codes required to boot up MPE and other software. The key is good for 360 hours of DR operation “and it expires at the same time our annual support does.”
The company has had enough computing bandwidth to experiment using that ProLiant DR box, since it’s not in day-to-day use. This work has expanded the virtual capability of that system’s VMware installation.
“We did a physical-to-virtual conversion of the Red Hat environment for the HP 3000 emulator, so our DR emulator is now running under VMware and we shut down the dedicated ProLiant server,” Elmer said. VMware handles making the USB key available to the emulator. “While you do not want to vMotion a running HP 3000 emulator, it seems to be quite happy under VMware. We can access the remote ESX hosts via vSphere, start the Red Hat host, start the HP 3000 emulator, and do a restore of the most recent full backup, all without getting out of a chair.
Elmer noted that all of the 3000 backups go to disk since moving to the emulator. This has eliminated the need to have a tape mounted by IT staff.
“We store to a virtual tape drive that is a file in the Red Hat space,” he said. “Those full backups are automatically copied off to an FTP server that is automatically replicated to our DR site — so we now have two copies of each full backup, one at the production site and one at the DR site.”