Friday, June 5, 2009

General update and a long weekend ahead

After a week of wrestling with CDW and EMC, two weeks of fighting the storage array, and coming up with an ad hoc environment in something like 2 hours, I've had a rough go of this whole backup-site-activation thing.

The latest wrinkle has been that although EMC shipped us the storage processor, the burned CD with an updated FlareOS was corrupt. You would think, "oh, just download it from the website". At least, that's what I thought. But no. Apparently I'm not special enough to get into that section or something, so I called support, explained the situation, and they told me in their most understanding voice that I had to talk to my sales contact. /sigh

So I called my CDW rep, explained the situation, and he said that he'd get right on it! Excellent. That was, I believe, Tuesday, a bit after the 2nd blog entry. Well, yesterday at 4:30pm he told me that he finally talked to the right people at EMC, and that they'd ship the CD out to me so that I would have it this morning. My reaction might be described as "cautiously optimistic".

Could it be that I finally get to install the 2nd storage processor? Maybe! If I do, it's going to make for a long, long weekend. The EMC docs say that the installation itself takes 6 hours with the software install and reinitialization of the processors. If that last sentence sounds ominous to you, too, it really just means that the software on the controllers gets erased and reinstalled, not the data on the SAN. At least that's what they tell me. I'm going to be extremely unhappy if that's the case.

Tune in next week for the next exciting installment of "How can Matt be screwed by his own ignorance"!