Last month I’ve performed a Isilon tech refresh of two clusters running NL400 nodes. In both clusters, the old NL400 36TB nodes were replaced with 72TB NL410 nodes with some SSD capacity. First step in the whole process was the replacement of the Infiniband switches. Since the clusters were fairly old, an OneFS upgrade was also on the list, before the cluster could recognize the NL410 nodes. Dell EMC has extensive documentation on the whole OneFS upgrade process: check the support website, because there’s a lot of version dependencies. Finally, everything was prepared and I could begin with the actual Isilon tech refresh: getting the new Isilon nodes up and running, moving the data and removing the old nodes.
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