Ask the Experts: EMC Isilon technical content and documentation

Hello everyone,

We're developing a new video series called "Cool Commands" and we're looking for your input on what to include. The concept is that each video will highlight one command or a few related commands and describe what information you can get or what tasks you can perform by running those commands and the various options they might have.

You might already have heard of "Cool Commands" if you listen the the ClusterTalk podcast. We're extending that concept to video so you can see the command and its output in action.

So, what commands would you like to know how to use? Or what information or tasks do you want to perform from the command line and are not sure which commands or options are available?

I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas!

Thanks for the video ideas, Katie. I'll talk with our IIQ experts about developing a 3.2 specific video.

Hi Katie,

We recently published a blog post on the ISI Knowledge blog about new InsightIQ 3.2 features. This post was written by Patrick Kreuch, who writes our InsightIQ technical documentation: http://isiblog.emc.com/2015/07/insightiq-3-2-cool-new-stuff/

Are there specific features you would like to see in a technical demo via video? I'm curious to learn what kind of technical content people like to learn from video. For example, should the videos focus on procedures and parts of the UI, or would you like to see a video that introduces the product as whole and other concepts.

André Morrissen wrote: Hello everyone, We're developing a new video series called "Cool Commands" and we're looking for your input on what to include. The concept is that each video will highlight one command or a few related commands and describe what information you can get or what tasks you can perform by running those commands and the various options they might have. You might already have heard of "Cool Commands" if you listen the the ClusterTalk podcast. We're extending that concept to video so you can see the command and its output in action. So, what commands would you like to know how to use? Or what information or tasks do you want to perform from the command line and are not sure which commands or options are available? I'm looking forward to hearing your ideas!

IIQ commands, pull data out of PostgreSQL to roll my own dashboards ?

Thanks for the release notes feedback, Katie. Our release notes team was glad to hear it!

Hi dynamox,

I checked with the InsightIQ team. The two cool command candidates for a video about creating custom dashboards would be "iiq_data_export" (pulling data from the InsightIQ datastore) or "isi statistics" (pulling data from the cluster). We could also demonstrate how to do this using the statistics API as well. We'll get this in the video production queue. Thanks for the suggestion!

-Kirsten

Thanks Kirsten, looking forward to it.

Hi Dynamox,

there is docu56264 which shows the changes of the CLI commands.

on the otherhand there is the undocumented isi_classic where you find most of the deprecated commands with the old syntax. quite useful when using scripts.

Regards

-- Steffen

when you transition between family releases (6.5 to 7.x for example), your developers tend to change a lot of CLI options/syntax.  Any thoughts about how to document these changes for people who upgrade.  Basically here is a command to set quota notification in 6.5 and here is an equivalent in 7.x

Steffen,

i don't want to rely on isi_classic as that is subject to going away or being deprecated.

docu56264 is a nice document, i had not clue it existed. Was it referenced in the release notes somewhere ?

Hi Kirsten,

talking about gaps - im still missing a "official" pull-message from EMC for 7.1.1.3

There was neither a ETA or something else. Only a quiet contact from the account-Team without stating reasons for the release pull. We had a discussion-thread in this community but there was no real answer for this.

Also i like the concept of the info-hubs. But they are getting more and more confusing with all the references, NEW! signs and Infos in infohubs about changes in other infohubs.

Best Regards

--Steffen

Hi All,

Am excited and nervous too.. Am preparing for the ISILON Implementation exam and will be writing soon.

Am seeing some useful stuff for me in this forum.

Thanks everyone for bringing this.

Hi Steffen,

I researched what happened with 7.1.1.3. There was an issue found after it was released for general availability (GA), which is documented in KB 201217. As soon as the issue was discovered, this release was pulled from GA to directed availability (DA), meaning that Support would provide the code after confirming that conditions outlined in KB 201217 are not met. There wasn't an ETA because this issue did not result in a data unavailability/data loss event. After the issue was fixed in 7.1.1.4, then 7.1.1.3 was pulled.

That being said, clear communication about the status change of a release is very important, so you don't have to learn about this kind of information primarily through discussion threads. At the moment, we communicate OneFS release information across several documents, as well as Info Hubs. We should be consistent, transparent, and clear about OneFS major and maintenance release information, and we're looking into it.

I'm glad you like the Info Hubs. The primary reason that we've been adding "NEW!" tags is because we've gotten feedback that it's difficult to identify what's been updated as we make changes to them. (The email notifications that the ECN platform sends out don't provide this kind of information). To remove some of the clutter from these pages, we can put stricker guidelines around what is considered "new" (for example, we remove this tag after one week). So less tags and messages, hopefully. Or we can explore adding a single "editor's note" to the top of the page to indicate what was updated. But ultimately, we want them to be useful, so this is valuable feedback for us. Just curious: are there Info Hubs that you like the best or refer to often?

Thanks,

Kirsten

Hi tazatemc,

Glad to hear that you are finding useful information on this forum!  Curious to see if there are documents that you found helpful as you prepare for this exam. Or are there any OneFS concepts that you would like to learn more about? Good luck with the exam!

Thanks,

Kirsten