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Isilon Tech Refresh – Replacing old NL400 Isilon nodes for NL410’s

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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VNX2 hands-on (a.k.a. Who stole my SPS?!)

A VNX5400 installed in the rackIn September 2013 EMC announced the new generation VNX with MCx technology (or VNX2). The main advantage of the new generation is a massive performance increase: with MCx technology the VNX2 can effectively use all the CPU cores available in the storage processors. Apart from a vast performance increase there’s also a boatload of new features: deduplication, active-active LUNs, smaller (256MB) chunks for FAST VP, persistent hotspares, etc. Read more about that in my previous post.

It took a while before I could get my hands on an actual VNX2 in the field. So when we needed two new VNX2 systems for a project, guess which resources I claimed to install them. Me, myself and I! Only to have a small heart attack upon unboxing the first VNX5400: someone stole my standby power supplies (SPS)!

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Implementation Day 2 – Start the Isilon

You should see something like this after you start the isilonYesterday we racked and stacked the EMC Isilon systems, prepared most of the cabling and pretty much prepared to start the Isilon systems. Which is pretty uneventful if you consider we’ve been dragging along hundreds of kilograms of equipment all day yesterday… The whole process can be pretty much split in four parts: configure the cluster and initial node, join the remaining nodes, configure the network, configure the rest.

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Implementation Day 1 – Isilon Rack and Stack

xrayI’m currently contracted by a customer that has been experiencing chronic capacity and performance issues in their storage environment. After analyzing the environment and writing an advisory report we got to work and started correcting and improving many aspects of the storage systems. One component of this overhaul is installing a pair of new Isilon systems which will store PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) data generated by the radiology department. The planning and design phase took place over the last couple of months, in which we involved both internal IT people and external resources such as the PACS vendor and the suppliers. All said, discussed and done: the actual implementation of the Isilon systems is scheduled for this week. Today: Isilon rack and stack!

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