Category Archives: Storage array - Page 8

How to set the “The array is alive” on a specific day and time on a VNX

Posted by on September 10, 2013 No comments

The need for weekly messages

EMC’s Symmetrix already knew this feature for a decade or so (or even longer), but since a few years EMC’s pushing customers to make every array to email home once a week so they can keep track of its pulse. And they’re not joking about its importance either, since once an array skips a beat, a severity 1 ticket is being created to get that fixed as soon as possible. EMC truly seems to care about the arrays they have running all over the world, so they’re indeed in good shape and being monitored actively.

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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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Migrating hosts to new storage ports, LIVE

Posted by on July 1, 2013 No comments

Migrating hosts to new storage ports, LIVE!

Many SAN administrators will face this challenge from time to time: certain hosts need to start using new storage ports. Reasons vary, but in the EMC Clariion/VNX world this might happen because it’s decided to dedicate the mirrorview ports to mirrorview only instead of allowing hosts to use these ports as well. Obviously having dedicated replication ports will improve replication performance and for synchronous replication this will also improve the production host performance since the write acknowledgement from the remote array will be quicker and the extra latency is limited to a minimum.
So you end up wanting to free the SPA1 and SPB1 ports (most Clarrions) or SPA0 and SPB0 (VNX). But disalowing hosts to use these ports means they will loose access to these paths. This just might be disruptive! Or not?

There’s a way to migrate nondisruptively!

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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.