About

Hi, my name is Alan Johnson and I have been working in the data storage industry for over 35 years. My areas of interest include tech writing and investigating new areas of research such as the latest storage initiatives. Published books are available at http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/alan52/ or you can ask me for a soft copy of my “Data Storage Fundamentals”

Thanks for reading,let me know if there are any pages that you would like added, and I can consider putting them into the lengthy queue. My writings are done as a hobby and I can only add content as time permits.

If you find these tutorials useful please leave comments or send an email to me. Also please feel free to link to any of the pages in this site. I cannot always respond to technical questions as some of these were written a while ago. The intent is to share my experiences and the postings here are in no way authoritative.

Thanks for visiting!

7 thoughts on “About”

umataro

September 30, 2015 at 14:12

thank you for the articles. I’d like to see one on FC. short theoretical intro that explains addressing, fabric, use of FC switches and then a practical multipath setup that anybody can try with a couple of computers and cheap ebay fc cards. whether with or without a FC switch (brocade 300 on ebay is also cheap enough for people to buy and practice on)

i recently bought 3 dualport qlogic fc cards, put them into my pc and 2 hp microservers and i’m finding it quite hard to even start. It is unbelievable how little in the way of literature is available for people who don’t want to study for single vendor’s certification program.

Reply
Ram

February 5, 2016 at 10:44

The articles are pretty much useful to lot of folks who are looking for the information. I will expect more articles on storage areas.

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Alfonso

June 20, 2016 at 10:22

Hi.
I have a trouble in ceph hands-on guide
all go ok until i do de ceph deploy from monserver to osdservers.
it give to me this error

[monserver0][WARNIN] –2016-06-20 16:14:18– https://download.ceph.com/keys/release.asc
[monserver0][WARNIN] Resolviendo download.ceph.com (download.ceph.com)… 173.236.253.173, 2607:f298:6050:51f3:f816:3eff:fe71:9135
[monserver0][WARNIN] Conectando con download.ceph.com (download.ceph.com)[173.236.253.173]:443… falló: Expiró el tiempo de conexión.
[monserver0][WARNIN] Conectando con download.ceph.com (download.ceph.com)[2607:f298:6050:51f3:f816:3eff:fe71:9135]:443… falló: La red es inaccesible.
[monserver0][WARNIN] command returned non-zero exit status: 4
[monserver0][INFO ] Running command: sudo apt-key add release.asc
[monserver0][WARNIN] gpg: no se han encontrados datos OpenPGP válidos
[monserver0][ERROR ] RuntimeError: command returned non-zero exit status: 2
[ceph_deploy][ERROR ] RuntimeError: Failed to execute command: apt-key add release.asc

any suggestion?

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- AJ
  
  June 20, 2016 at 11:18
  
  It looks like you are having trouble contacting download.ceph.com. Try and ping it to see if the networking is set up correctly. You can also check with the docs at ceph.com to double check – AJ
  
  Reply
  - Alfonso
    
    June 20, 2016 at 13:05
    
    i can ping 173.236.253.173. i try to do this un a remote server . i’ll talk with the admin to ask if i have any trouble with port 443.
    thx for reply
    And for every great guide you’re doing.
    
    Reply
  - Anonymous
    
    June 21, 2016 at 02:44
    
    All solved thx
    the router was blocking the 443 port
    
    Reply
Neeraj

May 23, 2017 at 18:20

Hi Alan,
Hope you are doing well. I couldn’t find any way to contact you so just thought of commenting here I’m looking for an opportunity in Big Data/Hadoop so just thought of having a word with you if I may stand any chances with Supermicro.

Looking forward to hear from you. Thank You.

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