The Grumpy IT Admin

We have had an ongoing issue with our EqualLogics systems where they have a massive disk latency problem. We have narrowed this down to 11 second periods where there is no network activity on the controllers. We have passed all the information to Dell but are still without a fix. This problem has been with us from the start across all the firmware revisions. The most affected system is the system that receives the most replication traffic, had has the fewest live servers on it. The only thing we have got back so far is that there is something going on with replication even though the periods we are seeing this are not confined to when replication is happening. Dell obviously want us to upgrade to the latest firmware but this is not a good idea at the moment as a replication bug has been found that appears to throttle replication to around 25MB/s which is not desirable. Dell are not acknowledging this but our suppliers are definitely seeing it and have advised us to not update to

I have been imaging hard drives over the network as part of my working life for more years than I care to remember, this has involved mostly using Altiris' RDeploy tools but also occasionally Ghost and Disk copy and some Paragon tools. Things can wrong if you don't pay attention, I remmber once dropping a DOS image on to our Exchange Mailbox server rather than taking an image of it for DR testing, oh how we laughed, fortunately it was just teh system drive so was quite easy to fix. However after a recent purchase of some Samsung SSDs I had occasion to investigate am recent copy of Ghost 15. Oh dear what were they thinking, or perhaps they weren't. Symantec seem to be making one mistake after the other of late, every major release of software seems to be changed beyond all recognition and useabilty, Altiris 7/7.1, Backup Exec 2012 and now Ghost. Disk imaging should be simple, put a bootable CD/USB drive in, boot to it say copy this disk to this disk and job done. That i