Obviously my post frequency has dramatically decreased this is due to a couple of factors.  First I am busy so I have less time to turn my experiences into easy to digest blog posts and second myself and a few of my comrades have been developing something we call “Project Hive” .  As you can probably tell from many of my blog posts most of my work in recent years has been associated with EMC technologies.  Throughout the years we realized that while there are some good framework tools out there they are costly, require significant customization and often don’t solve the common day-to-day operational issues that system administrators face.  The goal of “Project Hive” is to dramatically simplify the common tasks associated with managing EMC technologies.  Being intimately familiar with these tasks we have developed a platform that is based on a distributed collection, aggregation and presentation, we call this the “Honeycomb”, each Honeycomb contains modules, we call these “Workers” which are responsible for the collection, aggregation and analysis of data from discrete infrastructure components, all workers are centrally managed on the Honeycomb and use standard based methods to collect data (i.e. – WMI, SSH, SNMP, APIs, etc…).  “Project Hive” is a very active project and we are continually adding functionality to existing workers and building new workers as time permits or requirements dictate.

Any EMC customer who has been through an upgrade is familiar with the EMCGrab process (the process of running the EMCGrab utility on each individual SAN attach host within the environment and providing the output to EMC so they can validate the host environment prior to the upgrade).

In a reasonably sized environment this process can be tedious and time consuming, one of our released workers centralizes and automates the EMCGrab process.  I recently created a video which contrasts the process of running an EMCGrab manually on an individual host vs. using the Hive Worker.  My hope is to publish more of these videos in the future but as you can imagine they take a bit of time to produce.  If you are looking for more information contact the Project Hive team at dev@projecthive.info

A hi-resolution video is available here .