My good friend
Dane Sanders, a great photographer in Orange County, emailed me a few weeks ago with a problem. He'd hit the wall. His G5 was out of storage space and he needed a solution right away.
So, I asked him a set of questions to gauge his needs and came up with an awesome expandable storage solution that will grow with him as he grows his business.
I ordered the hardware and bought my plane ticket into John Wayne airport to visit Dane and
Mike Colón last week.
Now Dane has a 12 bay enclosure with 750GB of mirrored storage space at his disposal which he can expand up to 9TB of space as he needs it. How's that for expandability!
I flew in Wednesday morning and drove out to Dane's church,
Rock Harbor to meet up and get directions to his home in Costa Mesa. Dane gave me a tour of his church and it's awesome! Go check out their website!
Here's Dane's house from the car. :) He recently moved into this place from Santa Barbara. It's a great house, I love his wood floors and look at that lawn?!
So first things first we had to
de-tangle and disconnect his mess of wires behind the desk and pull out the G5 to put a new
PCI card in it. Once the card was installed I connected the cables that go to the hard drive enclosure and cleaned up his fire hazard that was the mess of dust bunnies and tangled cables behind his desk. :)
Then we unwrapped the enclosure and installed the 750GB hard drives into the first two bays.
Once the drives were mounted into the drive trays, it was a simple matter to slide them into the enclosure and hook it up to the cables that attach to the G5. The new
PCI card called an '
HBA' then needed to be configured to tell the OS what to do with the new hard drives we just installed. I setup Dane's system to use the two 750GB drives as a mirrored RAID set. Now should one drive fail the other drive in the mirror protects you from failure! Replacing the failed drive is as easy as sliding the drive out of the enclosure and installing a new drive in the tray. Even better, you can put a third drive in the system to act as a 'hot spare'. This drive is meant to sit idle in the enclosure just waiting for something to go wrong with a drive that's part of a RAID set. Should a drive fail, the
HBA automagically rebuilds the array using the 'hot spare' disk. How awesome is that?! No user intervention required and your data is still 100% protected.
When he wants to expand his storage space Dane just adds new hard drives to the enclosure and tells the
HBA how to present them to the OS. Easy!
We didn't stop there. Dane had a laundry list of things he hoped I could help him out with and I'm pleased to say we accomplished all of them.
Dane already had two identical hard drives in his G5. One was his
startup disk where the operating system and applications are installed and the other disk he was using for storage. One thing most people take for granted is the vulnerability of your computer's system disk. What happens if that drive were to malfunction? Well, if you didn't have it backed up or protected in some way then you'd find yourself reinstalling your OS and ALL of your applications again. It's a tedious process that I've had the pleasure of doing far too many times. To spare Dane from this eventuality we moved all the data off his second hard drive to his new RAID setup and created a new RAID mirror set of his
startup disk and the second drive. This is all a non-destructive process that doesn't require any re-installation of applications or operating system and gives you a huge safety net.
We also wanted to give Dane the ability to
login to his G5 from the
internet to get work done on his system from where ever he is. This is a huge deal since he'll be in London and India next week. We configured his home router to allow access to his system via
VNC, a virtual desktop application. I also setup FTP access so he can move files to and from his G5 to his laptop in the field. Lastly we setup encryption on his home wireless network to give him a bit more privacy.
To top it off, I custom tailored a new
workflow for Dane so he can make the most of his new RAID system and existing external
firewire hard drive. I included a few
applescript droplets that automatically create folders for new clients and manage files.
Phew!
Here's Dane and his messy baby having just finished dinner and headed for the bath tub!
Check out Dane's
Simple Photo Minute website soon for a podcast featuring his new RAID setup and my consulting services. It should be up after Dane returns from his trip to India. Have a great time my friend!
While I was down in the
OC I called up my friend
Mike Colón who has been having issues with the RAID system he setup a few months ago. After a tour of Mike's new place and a great dinner made by his awesome wife Julie (thanks Julie!) we got to work.
We determined that one of the disks in Mike's 10 drive striped mirror RAID set was bad. The trouble is, Apple's software based RAID doesn't exactly tell you what the problem is. It's less that straightforward to diagnose but we got it figured out. Off to Fry's to buy a new drive and many hours of rebuilding the array and he's almost back in business. I had to catch my flight back to Seattle while we were still waiting for his array to rebuild and Mike's off to Vegas for a convention so when he returns we'll finish up the process. I also helped Mike out with his home network. We got him all setup with a
gigabit ethernet switch in his closet so now Julie can edit photos or check Mike's calendar from their
iMac that's in the kitchen.
We were up so late on Wednesday working on his RAID system and I hadn't even found my hotel yet so Mike being the gracious and generous man he is let me crash on his couch. :)
Mike and Julie's kids are so cute!
Aiden is a really fun 3 year old and precious Logan is only 8 weeks old!
Mike's house in Newport Beach taken with my
Nikkor 10.5mm
fisheye
Mike's place is in an awesome gated community in Newport Beach where you have to be 'on the list' to get in. Posh! The alley in back of their house is full of kids playing. You really get a sense of community. Everyone is so nice and they really look after all the kids.
Mike's living room where he meets his clients.
Underneath the coffee table Mike has his stack of sample
La Vie and
Leather Craftsmen albums. I love La
Vie's books! Check out my La Vie album of
Jenny & Tyree.
My flight out on Thursday evening was eventful too. I almost missed the flight! I forgot my
powerbook AC adapter at Mike's place that morning so I ran back over to pick it up and say goodbye and I thought I had plenty of time to get back to the airport since everything is so close together there. I ended up
barely making my flight! I walked up to the gate as they were boarding the last few passengers. Darn, no time to get a Starbucks.
On the Tarmac
I feel so blessed to have made friends with people like Mike and Dane. They have really helped drive me to be successful in my business and their friendships are dear to my heart. Thank you both for all your support.
It was a great trip! I'd love to fly out and custom configure a a solution for you too! Shoot me an
email if you'd like to talk about your studio needs.
Labels: Consulting
Jeff LaPlante
