Wednesday, February 27, 2019

Today we continue discussing the best practice from storage engineering:

510) The storage product just like any other software product is a culmination of efforts from a forum of roles and people playing those roles. The recognition and acceptance of the software is their only true feedback.

511) Almost every entry in the storage for users data is sandwiched between a header and a footer in some container and the data segments read with offset and length. This mechanism is repeated at various layers and becomes all the more useful when data is encrypted.

512) Similarly entries of data are interspersed with routine markers and indicators from packaging and processing perspectives. Many background jobs frequently stamp what’s relevant to them in between data segments so that they can continue their processing in a progressive manner.

513) It must be noted that the packaging of data inside the storage product has many artifacts that are internal to the product and certainly not readable in raw form. Therefore some offline command line tool to dump and parse the contents could prove very helpful.

514) The argument above also holds true for message passing between shared libraries inside the storage product  While logs help capture the conversations, their entries may end up truncated. An offline tool to fully record, replay and interpret large messages would be helpful for troubleshooting.

515) Most of the storage products have embraced APIs in one form or the other. Their usage for protocols with external agents, internal diagnostics and manageability are valuable as online tools and merit the same if not better appreciation than scripts and offline tools.

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