EAGLE Visions, Fall 1996

Automated backup solutions

Spectra 10000 introduces new technology, relies on proven features for data safety

The newest in hardware technology for total automated backup solutions  the Spectra 10000  is available from EAGLE Software.

The 10000 tape library incorporates the award-winning library design of the Spectra 4000 4mm tape library and the Spectra 9000 8mm tape library, with the added feature of exceptional capacity and throughput  ideal for fast, frequent backups of large networks and servers, VLDBs and data warehouses. The 10000 offers 2.6 terabytes of compressed storage (1 TB native), in a robust, reliable library, that requires only seven inches of rack mount space.

Each library includes two Fast Wide SCSI interfaces to eliminate throughput bottlenecks (31.2 MB/sec. compressed; 12 MB/sec. native). A number of backup and hierarchical storage management (HSM) software packages are supported by the Spectra 10000.

AIT tape drive

Sony's Advanced Intelligent Tape (AIT) ushers in a new era of tape technology, with dramatic improvements in performance, capacity, and reliability. The tape drive provides 65 GB of storage (25 GB native) on a single Advanced Metal Evaporated (AME) media cartridge, with transfer rates of 7.8 MB/sec. (3.0 MB/sec. native).

This tape technology is not just an extension of 8mm storage. It is engineered specifically for data recording, with reliability as important as performance. The tape requires virtually no head cleaning, has 30,000 hour head life, and is media rated for 20,000 passes.

The Spectra 10000 will support multiple generations of AIT technology, just as Spectra 9000 users can upgrade to take advantage of the Spectra 10000 technology. The Spectra 10000 with 20 drive slots can be upgraded to a 40-slot library, a barcode reader can be added, and an additional four drives can also be added. Multiple Spectra 10000 libraries can be rack mounted for additional capacity.

Compatibility

The Media Compatibility Engine (MCE) in the Spectra 10000 will copy existing 8mm, 4mm, or DLT tapes to AIT. The feature is configured through the LCD touch screen, and is performed off line, with no CPU host intervention. While the Spectra 10000 technology is very advanced, the design of the library has remained simple: only three rotary motors move and load the cartridges. The closed-loop robotic design and optical sensors ensure that the library is aware of the state and location of media, drives, robotics, and inventory thousands of times each second.

The Spectra 10000, based on Sony's AIT drive, brings DLT class performance to a line of libraries which has a proven track record for high reliability and very fast cartridge access speed, according to Dale Swindler, systems integration engineer and head of EAGLE's backup solutions business unit.

Questionnaire results Newsletter survey reveals reader's buying criteria, time spent on line

In a recent issue of Visions, we conducted a survey of our readers to see what you thought of this publication, how you would like to see it changed, and to learn more about you.

We would like to thank everyone who responded, and congratulate the winners of the $200 American Express Gift Cheques.

We had a variety of respondents: one from a company with eight users, and one from an organization with 60,000 users. We had answers from S. Korea, England, Greece, Germany, Australia and the United States.

The respondents requested more examples of clients using EAGLE's products, as well as more technical product information.

Value was the top consideration when making a purchasing decision. Following close behind were company reputation and recommendations from colleagues. Least important factors were information from email and the internet. Direct mail and advertising averaged in the middle of the scale in importance when making purchases.

Other factors respondents said they take into consideration when purchasing equipment or software included features and usefulness, technical value, product reputation and product performance.

Of the respondents who answered the question about time spent on the internet, 26 percent said they spend 1-5 hours per week online. Twenty-one percent reported spending less than one hour on the internet, 15 percent spend more than 10 hours on the internet each week, and 12 percent average between 5-10 hours.

Thank you again for the input, and we encourage you to continue to let us know how Visions can help you.

Local agricultural equipment manufacturer provides testing ground for EAGLE products

Nestled in a converted school house in Assaria, Kansas, (population 387), there is a company making huge strides in farm equipment manufacturing. Great Plains Manufacturing, Inc. has grown from a small start-up business in 1976, to a company of more than 1,300 employees, with factories in three states and parts depots located throughout the U.S. and Canada. Great Plains used to describe themselves as The Grain Drill Company, but they have gone on to diversify, now manufacturing a wide variety of equipment, including mowers, tillers, rakes, pulverizers, sprayers, and a plethora of attachments for those products.

Because of the size of the company and the technical nature of much of their work, EAGLE Software and Great Plains have developed a mutually beneficial relationship. Randy Jones, system administrator for Great Plains, has tested numerous products for EAGLE, allowing EAGLE technical staff a nearby location to test our products in a real-world environment.

"Randy has been helpful in many of our tests," said Dave Hiechel, president of EAGLE. "He is always very willing to try new things and lets our programmers work closely with his system to experiment with different product features."

Jones has tested EAGLE's out-bound faxing product, EagleFax, and recently looked at FaxFX, a full-featured faxing product for network systems. He has also used EAGLE's newest product, DISK_PAK OnLine!, the disk defragmentation utility.

"(The relationship with EAGLE) has been really good for us," Jones said. "We send a lot of faxes between the plants and the engineering offices, and the automated faxing products made that easier."

Faxing made easy

Jones said with 15 minutes of training on FaxFX, the users were comfortable with the product. FaxFX is available from EAGLE.

He worked with a number of EAGLE technical staff members in the various tests, and said "they are always really helpful. I call them if I have a problem or question, and we get it worked out."

Jones understands how important it is to maintain smooth day-to-day operations for the people on the system he manages. He started with the company in 1984 as a product engineer. In the company's search for a CAD (Computer Aided Design) system, Randy learned more and more about computers and systems, and computer-related duties took more and more of his time, until finally he was designated to the system administration job full time.

There are about 50 users on the system Jones manages, ranging from engineers and draftsmen on CAD machines, to managers and technical writers and illustrators. The shop is also on a Sun system for email and to have access to the company network.

On-line manuals

Jones said the plants are not on the company network yet, but they are working to get on the Internet. They eventually plan to put their parts manuals on line, giving dealers and customers access to the information. Each manual is about a 20 megabyte file, so they need 2 gigabytes of storage just for the manuals.

Larson returns to EAGLE for DISK_PAK OnLine! launch

Continuing a long-term relationship with EAGLE Software, Milton Larson returned to the company as a member of the development staff in April. Milton is a primary developer of EAGLE's newest product, DISK_PAK OnLine!, the on-line disk optimizer and defragmentation utility for UNIX.

Milton started working with EAGLE in 1982, and played an integral part in the company's development as EAGLE grew from writing custom software to producing a wide range of performance-enhancing utilities for the Data General AOS/VS market. Milton developed the VS_TOOLBOX, the first of EAGLE's products to reach one million dollars in sales. VS_TOOLBOX is a set of utilities designed to improve system performance and security on AOS/VS and AOS/VS II operating systems. Milton also developed FILE_MONITOR, a utility for AOS/VS and AOS/VS II that lets system administrators monitor, balance and manage their disk subsystems.

Milton has played an important role in the development of DISK_PAK and the AFP (Automatic File Placement) technique. In 1991, Milton founded eXpert systems and developed DISK_PAK OnLine! for AOS/VS, another million dollar product that EAGLE markets.

After developing a prototype of DISK_PAK OnLine! for UNIX, Milton and EAGLE saw the mutual benefit of having him back on staff to devote full attention to continuing enhancements and porting the product to additional UNIX platforms. DISK_PAK OnLine! is currently available for Solaris, Solaris x86 and HP-UX.

DISK_PAK OnLine! was announced at UNIX Expo in September 1996. An enhancement to EAGLE Software's flagship defragmentation product called DISK_PAK for UNIX, this on-line version allows the system to be optimized without taking the system down, and is transparent to the users while it is running. DISK_PAK OnLine! includes disk monitor capabilities to allow system administrators to actively monitor disk performance.

Tech tip for UNIX systems

Starting and stopping the Alexandria Daemons from the Command Line

Quite often when working with Alexandria, it becomes necessary to manipulate the daemons from a shell via the command line. This functionality can be extremely useful in dial-up or remote administration situations. Trying to get your X interface going across a modem, via a slow network, or on an under-powered machine can often be unnecessarily slow or even impossible.

Alexandria has three daemons:

• Alexandria Database daemon
• Alexandria Network daemon
• Alexandria Scheduler daemon.

ALEX-DBASE

"alex-dbase manages the Alexandria database daemon. alex-dbase is also used to import and export Alexandria databases to correct a corrupted database, to safely preserve databases while replacing Alexandria software, and to pack the Alexandria database."

Most commonly the alex-dbase command will be used to start or stop the database daemon or to pack the database tables.

	alex-dbase -s		  starts the database daemon
	alex-dbase -k		  stops (or kills) the database daemon

Both of these commands can be used to control the daemon on a remote Alexandria host, or server, machine by inserting -h followed by the machine name. For example the following would start the Alexandria database on the remote Alexandria server machine named maverick.

	alex-dbase -h maverick -s

A maintenance routine that can be performed from the command-line is packing the database. This procedure can help reclaim disk space and fix corruption in the Alexandria databases. However, this is a command line routine that should only be performed under the supervision of Alexandria support personnel as it could take many hours.

ALEX-NET

"alex-net is used to manage the Alexandria network daemon. The network daemon controls inbound access. If the daemon is inactive (stopped), no remote machine can access Alexandria's databases or functionality on this local machine. The local machine, conversely, can communicate with other remote machines for which it has permission, as long as the network daemon is running on the machine being accessed."

Starting and stopping the network daemon is similar to the database daemon:

	alex-net -s	             starts the network daemon
	alex-net -k	             stops the network daemon

While database daemons on remote machines cannot be started and stopped remotely with the alex-net command, you can ping other Alexandria machines to see if their network daemons are running.

       alex-net -p merlin                 pings the remote Alexandria network
                                                    daemon running on merlin	
       alex-net -PA  	              pings all remote machines on the network

There are several other alex-net options which are useful in multi-machine Alexandria installations.

ALEX-SCHED

"alex-sched manages the Alexandria scheduler daemon. Alexandria op-cards (stores, restores or searches) are executed only if the scheduler daemon is running."

Like the other two daemons, the -s and -k options start and stop (kill) the scheduler daemon. The -h option can also be used by the scheduler daemon to start or stop a remote Alexandria scheduler daemon. For example:

    alex-sched -h tomcat -k      Kills the scheduler daemon 
                                      on remote machine tomcat.

Tech tip for MV systems

Bitmap or overlay area: To move or not to move?

DISK_PAK OnLine! is EAGLE Software's on-line disk optimization utility for MV and Unix systems. OnLine! defragments all the files and available space on a disk, and then goes one step further to optimize disk performance by clustering the most frequently accessed information together, creating a hot spot. The hot spot is, quite simply, the area of the disk that will receive the most accesses. By clustering directories and the most frequently accessed files together at the hot spot, the distance the read/write heads must travel (seek distance) is dramatically reduced, and disk performance is improved.

On MV systems, OnLine! also places some very special pseudo-files at the hot spot. On AOS/VS Classic these pseudo-files are the bitmap and the overlay area. The bitmap is the permanent record of which disk blocks are in use and which blocks are available. As files grow or are created and deleted, the bitmap is constantly being accessed. The overlay area is where lesser used portions of the operating system code reside, and only exists on disks that were formatted (with DFMTR) as system disks.

PCOPY is Data General's physical disk copy utility for VS Classic. It allows you to quickly copy an entire disk off to tape or to another disk. When loading a PCOPY image to disk, the bitmap and overlay area must be in the same location on disk and on the image. If they are not in the same location, you must move the bitmap and overlay area on disk to match the image using DFMTR. Usually, this isn't a problem. It is an issue when you have optimized a disk, and then want to re-load an image that was saved before the optimization was performed. For this reason, when OnLine! moves the bitmap or overlay area on VS Classic, it reports that fact, along with the new address(es).

In revision 02.03.03.00 of OnLine!, the option was added to NOT move the bitmap or overlay area. While this decreases the effectiveness of the optimization, it saves the hassle of running DFMTR in the situation described above. To tell OnLine! to not move the bitmap or overlay area, use the /DEFINE_FILES switch and list the bitmap and overlay area in the STATIC portion of the file definition list as in the example below:

STATIC
bitmap
overlay area

If you use PCOPY, you may also be interested in EAGLE's PCOPY_PAL utility that allows files to be selectively restored from a PCOPY image.