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Drum roll please…

The management team at G Media are all keyed up at the moment as our fearless leader Garion Hall is about to unveil our revised and super charged Performance Review Policy.  Garion has spent a billion hours, give or take, researching, measuring, benchmarking; you name it he’s done it and all in the name of accurately measuring and recognising G Median’s game-changing performance.

I had a sneak peak at it the other day it looks pretty amazing!! It made me think about my role as a manager. A manager’s most important and most difficult job is to manage people. You must lead, motivate, inspire, and encourage them. Sometimes you will have to hire, fire and discipline employees.

People don’t really work for companies; they work for managers. To the extent that you can be a good manager, you can keep employees, keep them happy, and reduce the costs associated with employee turnover. In the process, you should make your own job easier.

Employees are one of a company’s largest expenses, unlike other costs (buildings, machinery, technology, etc.) employees as assets are highly volatile.   Managing performance is not always easy, as there is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to managing people and their performance.  So as a manager how do I ensure I am getting the best from each individual…??  Well I’m no leading authority but this is what I have learnt in practice, through observation but mostly reflection.. Lots of cringe worthy reflection!

Make sure your people have everything they need to do their job well.

By hell or high water, you have to get them what they need to do the job, and do it right. This includes:

• Proper training
• Proper tools
• Properly defined position descriptions and KPI’s.
• Well documented processes and procedures
• Adequate and proper motivation
• Trust in you as their manager (and yes, they absolutely need this in order to do the job well. It’s not optional.)
• Appreciation/Morale

Get everything that impedes your people from doing their job out of the way.

This is often the most difficult for me.  It’s not glamorous or fun work. Slogging through this stuff takes lots of time and energy. I know it leaves me drained, but, it needs to be done. What to look for when you are clearing a path:

• Old processes and procedures that are no longer needed
• Non-productive meetings
• Work that is not related to the core mission of your team
• Lack of communication.
• Unrealistic expectations from customers, other management, or even the employees themselves.

Make sure your people are performing, and make sure they know you’re all over it…
Once you’ve got the first two sorted, it’s time for some accountability. The key here is defining “job well done” in a way that can be objectively measured and inspected. Your people should know:

• What is being measured
• Why it’s being measured
• That you expect them to uphold a certain level of performance
• You will be regularly inspecting for that level of performance
• What steps you will take if that performance level is not met
• What is offered if they exceed that performance level

Phew!!  A lot to take in right..? Hang in there still a tiny bit more.  Employees are responsible for their own performance within the team. As their manager, I am accountable to our (awesome) board of directors ensuring results in my department, concrete measurable results.

Everyone in the workplace has an important part to play in organisational performance. Good organisational performance is the result of high quality functioning by the individuals within it.  Go Team!!

Tags: G Media, Garion Hall, gmedia, management, motivation, performance review, staff, staff management
Posted in Featured, General, Production

Self confidence building for women starts with building self esteem

As the Production Manager at G Media I spend most of my day working with young women, whether it is staff or models.   As part of my induction I spent many weeks with Garion Hall discussing and learning about the many issues young women face in today’s society and how they take their toll on self confidence.

G Media takes its responsibility to women very seriously.  We collaborate with our models and staff to create an environment which supports the development of individual self confidence so that they in turn can make good healthy decisions for themselves.  Over the last 10 years Garion Hall, CEO, G Media, has worked extensively with social researchers, health workers and local women’s support groups to better understand what we can do every day at G Media to empower woman who value who they are, feel confident and believe in themselves.

We believe that once a woman recognises her-self worth and confirms that she is a marvelous achievement then her feelings and trust in her own self worth will soar.  Confidence comes from a different place inside ourselves, we carry ourselves differently.

All of our experiences in life are opportunities to learn and connect more deeply with ourselves. The more we connect to ourselves, the more healing we do. When a situation makes us feel angry, sad, sick to our stomach, fearful or off centre in any way, our body expresses this discomfort by a physical contraction. This is a signal for us to reconnect with ourselves.

I love it when I see this reconnection in the young women we work with, and they love it too. When young women start believing in themselves and replacing negative thoughts with satisfaction and confidence, their whole life changes. They are no longer making decisions for the wrong reasons; the decisions they make are decisions that are good for them. I get to watch their appearance actually change too. They stand straighter, they walk with a sense of sureness, and they speak with confidence, because they are.

As a woman, there is nothing more inspiring to me than a young woman learning how to stand in her power or a woman standing strong in her power. I feel so lucky in my life to be able to witness these miraculous changes in the women I work with everyday. It reminds me how big love is.

Tags: confidence, G Media, Garion Hall, gmedia, self esteem
Posted in Blogs, Featured, General, Marketing, Production

Configuring Apple XSAN 2.0 clients for Stornext MDCs and volumes

Configuring Apple XSAN 2.0 clients for Stornext MDC’s and volumes

(If you’re just looking for the solution, scroll down to the “Solution” heading.)

This is a relatively informal post in part meant as a rant and in part a solution…

BACKGROUND

Thanks to Apple’s super proprietary nature and the relative idiot proofing of any documentation, getting XSAN clients to connect to Stornext volumes requires some out of the box thinking.

We have just finished installing a new SAN system to take care of the whole company’s data requirements including the Avid Media Composer systems used in G Media’s post production.  I’ll go into this in more detail in other posts.  For the purposes of this post I can describe the system broadly as follows.

2 x 24TB array enclosures configured with a series of specifically created RAID groups set up as RAID5, 6 or 50 depending on the application.

This presents 4 main volumes:  media, data, hafs and complete.

These are presented to Quantum Stornext metadata controllers and formatted with SNFS.

All the Avid Media Composers and several back office servers are SAN attached Stornext clients over 4Gb FC.  There is also a Bridge machine that is fibre attached and serves Stornext distributed LAN client connections to a further series of servers.

The installation of all the Windows clients was really quite easy.  A simple point and shoot installer, give it the IP addresses for the two Meta Data Controllers (MDCs) and map volumes to Windows drive letters.  Getting a Mac to connect was a different story!

For those who don’t know, Apple’s XSAN product is Quantum Stornext under the hood.  It’s basically a version of the MDC code ported to Darwin.  What this means is you can buy a client version of Stornext for various other OSs and connect them to your Apple XServe RAID.  That is if you were silly enough to buy one.

What Apple don’t advertise is you can do the reverse:  run a Stornext set of disks and MDCs, and connect a Mac to it using the XSAN client.  What neither Quantum or Apple will tell you up front is some pair of idiots from both sides did some deal that says only Apple is allowed to sell Apple Stornext software.  What this lead to is Apple refusing to port the Distributed Ethernet Client (DLC) for the Mac, sighting incompatibility with their XServe RAID product.  On the up side, XSAN clients are cheaper than either the SAN or DLC Stornext clients so you just have to deal with the fact you’re going to need the fibre infrastructure to support them.

THE LEAD UP

So!  You get your XSAN license fancy little box in the mail and open it to find even more designer packaging and a manual that is both understandable by three-year-olds and tells you absolutely nothing.  On the disk is an installer, that runs and finishes.  Then you launch the XSAN admin utility, conveniently located in /Applications/server so you don’t find it the fist time you look.  Running this results in an initial setup phase that first asks the question:  Create a new SAN or join an existing one.  So you click on ‘Join existing SAN’ (as we already have one) and it asks you for a server, username and password.  It doesn’t tell you what they’re for but its easy to assume its for the primary MDC.  At this point you’ll find yourself going around in circles because it can’t connect to the MDC and never will this way.

THE FAULT FINDING:

(From here I’ll describe the process I went through determining what was going on.  It may give someone out there some other ideas or at least a better understanding of what the back end of Stornext looks like.)

Note that what we’re trying to do is get the Mac to see and mount two of the SN volumes called ‘media’ and ‘complete’.  What follows are the notes at the time:

The MDCs are both listed in DNS, all the FQDN’s work from any given machine.  The MDCs are not binded to the AD though, and would be a difficult task to do.  Neither is the Mac we’re trying to install the client on, this may be easier to do.

After installing XSAN and launching XSAN admin, you’re given the option to create a new SAN or connect to an existing one.  When you hit ‘connect to an existing one’ it asks for a server, username and password.  If you put in the IP, the name or the FQDN of the MDCs it comes back and tells you it can’t find the server on the network.  Interestingly if you put in its own IP, username and password, it comes back and tells you the machine is not a server.  So at least it’s looking …  at something.

All the different OS clients are very similar once installed and all have the same set of utilities and config files.  Where to find them differs on the OS.  Using them is generally similar in the CLI but certain syntaxes may change depending on the OS.  The Mac client behaves very similarly to the AIX Unix client, however the files are located in \Library\Filesystems\Xsan instead of \usr\Filesystems\stornex.

The ‘cvadmin’ utility in \Library\Filesystems\Xsan\bin immediately returns “no FSSs are active” and states that “the XSAN file system services may be stopped on 127.0.0.1.”  I messed around with some of the commands to no avail.  Weirdly if I tried “start media 192.168.0.135″ it said the FSM already existed, but didn’t do anything about it.

Also, the ‘fsmpm’ process isn’t running either.  Presumably because the initial config hasn’t been completed to start it.  This would explain why ‘cvadmin’ can’t find any FSSs, I suppose.  You can start ‘fsmpm’ by running ‘xsand’ directly from \Library\Filesystems\Xsan\bin.  However, ‘cvadmin’ comes back with the same result after this.

The Mac can see all the luns OK from disk-manager.  One interesting thing is cvadmin’s ‘disks’ command returns nothing.  However, if you start the ‘fsmpm’ process (by running ‘xsand’ directly from Library\Filesystems\Xsan\bin) then the ‘disks’ command returns a series of what look like the volumes but segmented (I’m assuming by LUN) across multiple mount-points, located where you’d expect them in \dev\rdisk(x).  Further attempts at ‘start’, ‘activate’ or ‘fsmlist’ commands return nothing interesting.  Nor does running ‘cvadmin’ again.

All the other clients have a “fsnameservers” file in the config folder.  So I created a plaintext file called fsnameservers, put in the IP numbers of the MDCs (in order) and put the file in \Library\Filesystems\Xsan\config.  No change after a restart.

If you run ‘mount_acfs’ from \Library\Filesystems\Xsan\bin it comes back and says “cannot mount, license authorization failure”.

And that was the clue that I needed. Basically, because the initial install hadn’t completed and I hadn’t put in a  serial number, the installer hadn’t put all the config files where they should be and activated everything.

THE SOLUTION

First we need to fool the XSAN installer that we’re going to be using an Apple MDC.  In this case, the machine we’re installing the client on will be that MDC.  At that first screen you want to create a new SAN, not join an existing one.  The prompts are fairly easy from here, add the system, add a serial number, tell it that this system is the MDC and finish the install.  At this stage you can close the admin utility and never need it again.

Navigate to /Library/Filesystems/Xsan/config/ in the Finder and open the fsnameservers file in text edit.  Make sure text edit is set up to save as plaintext not rich text and won’t add file extensions.  The file will contain the IP number of the machine your on.  Delete this and put in the IP numbers of the Stornext MDCs, in order (primary then secondary), save and close it.

You will need to have the root user enabled to continue.

Open a terminal and type:

#su

(enter root password)

# rm /Library/Filesystems/Xsan/config/.auth_secret

# kill –HUP `cat /var/run/fsmpm.pid`

# /Library/FileSystems/Xsan/bin/cvadmin

You should now see all the available Stornext volumes.  It is possible that ‘acfs_mount’ needs to restart first. So to be on the safe side, restart the machine, open a terminal and just type:

#su

(enter root password)

# /Library/FileSystems/Xsan/bin/cvadmin

To mount my volumes (‘media’ and ‘complete’) I did the following:

/#  cd Volumes

/Volumes#  su

/Volumes#  mkdir media

/Volumes#  mkdir complete

/Volumes#  mount -w -t acfs media /Volumes/media

/Volumes#  mount -w -t acfs complete /Volumes/complete

And you’re away!

What I will cover in future posts is how Avid Media Composer handles (or rather doesn’t handle very well) shared media on Stornext volumes.

And thenI found this article buried deep on Apples support site.

Tags: SAN, StorNext, XSAN
Posted in Blogs, Featured, Post-Production

Information Asymmetry and Customer Service

If you’re like me, knowing next to nothing about cars, you dread taking the car in for a service. Well, this week when my car wouldn’t start, the first thought that popped in to my head was: “How much am I going to get stung?”.

I bought my car brand new and drove it off the showroom floor seven years ago. Oh, what an experience that was. Fast forward seven years, no major faults or repairs over the years other than the usual service. Until Tuesday week ago. That morning, the car wouldn’t start and had to get it towed to the flagship dealership for service.

I get a call at lunch saying it was the starter motor (WTF is that?!) – it was gonna cost me $2,000 and the part needed to be shipped from overseas and it would take two weeks. Something didn’t sound right. Maybe it was the nervous voice at the end of line? I called around other dealers of the same brand. Same part and labour would cost me $1,250 (the highest price of the three dealers I called).

Maybe the mechanics I called weren’t as smart. You know, they may not be good enough to work at the flagship showroom. Anyway, I thought I’d experiment with the new information I had gained. So I telephoned the flagship.

“Hi, just got another quote for the part,” I said, “You’re right, it’s going to have to be shipped from overseas; they don’t have any in stock. And you’re right, it’s not cheap, it’s going to cost me $1,087 and $230 for labour.” My reliable friend “Silence” stepped in. It must have seemed like an hour before the fellow at the end of the phone replied.

“Oh, umm, let me go and check the price again. Can you hold?” the well trained flagship mechanic asked.

“Hi, are you there? We can do you a better price. The best price we can do is $1,510,” he offered.

In short, I got them to send me the diagnostic report. The two entries were contradictory. I paid $169 for the labour cost to fit a new fuse and drove it to another dealer. The not-so-flagship dealer put it through several tests. Conclusion: nothing wrong with the starter motor. Hmmm.. I’m no expert when it comes to cars, but I know when someone’s tried to take me for a ride.

Posted in Blogs, Featured, General

Welcome to G Media

Tags: G Media, Production
Posted in Blogs, Featured, General, Home