Category Archives: hardware - Page 10

EMC Midrange Mega Launch: the new VNX

Posted by on September 4, 2013 6 comments

Midrange Mega Launch 2013: #Speed2Lead in real life!

Although the Clariion platform was a great platform a couple of years ago, the constant growth of customers’ environments and their need for more performance automatically means that storage vendors constantly need to improve their products as well. EMC VNX was able to serve customers just right for the last few years. With the introduction of flash storage in storage arrays performance issues seemed gone, but know that flash devices can easily outperform any rotating device (disk) by 20, 30, maybe even 50 times and depending on the I/O pattern, the back-end of an array could be a serious bottleneck since it wasn’t originally designed for performance demands like that and the old FLARE that ran on the CPUs wasn’t sufficient for the performance demand. So although FAST VP helps getting hot data to performance efficient devices and cold data to the slower and cheaper devices, it’s obvious that the array technology needed to be upgraded. And just like every 3 years or so, the necessity for new technology has come.

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EMC World 2013 – day 4

Posted by on August 27, 2013 No comments

A little late, but better late than never. This last EMC World post has been sitting in my drafts, knowing two of my coleagues already posted theirs about the exact same thing that I wanted to talk about. And since I don’t want to play copy cat, I’m going to refer to their posts. That seems the best thing to do.

EMC World 2013, day 4

Thursday is traditionally (half) a day to say goodbye to the many old and new friends, visit some last day sessions, leave the hotel and head back to the airport, but this year I planned ahead and I decided to stay a bit longer for some quality time with the EMC Elect: My plane wouldn’t leave until Saturday afternoon!! I had to switch hotels though from the fancy and luxurious Venetian to the hotel next door “Harrah’s”. It’s a huge step down, but Harrah’s does what it’s supposed to do and that’s offering me a bed to sleep.

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Other useful features of USM

Posted by on June 19, 2013 No comments

Techs focussed on EMC will know “EMC USM” for its use in upgrading storage arrays like Clariion and VNX as well as disk firmwares and installing enablers, but it can be used for other purposes as well.

Gearoid Griffin, a fellow EMC Elect 2013 member, wrote a nice article about it. Go have a look, I find it very interesting!

You can find his article on https://community.emc.com/people/GearoidG/blog/2013/04/04/other-useful-features-of-usm.

EMC SAN Copy best practices

Posted by on June 12, 2013 1 comment

SAN Copy zoningEMC SAN Copy best practices

  • Just like with MirrorView ports: don’t use SC ports as host front end ports. Try to use dedicated ports for SC
  • Make sure the zoning is correct between the source SAN Copy port and the target SAN Copy port
  • Don’t use zones with multiple storage array (initiator) ports in them. Try to use SIST whenever you can: Single Initiator, Single Target so you’re certain there can only be 1 initiator in each zone

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DIP upgrade from EMC VNX 5500 to VNX 5700

Posted by on May 23, 2013 6 comments

Data In Place upgrading an EMC VNX 5500 to VNX 5700

Last week I had the pleasure of being involved in a data in place upgrade of a VNX 5500 that was in desperate need of more capacity and performance. The decision was made to perform a DIP, so this is in fact an easy procedure: replace the Storage Processors and you’re good to go? Well, almost.

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