A VNX Unified upgrade is fairly easy: Unisphere Service Manager (USM) does most of the heavy lifting. A Block only system is the simplest of all: you upload a .ndu software package to the system and wait for the update to complete.
A Unified system is a combined package of a VNX Block system, and a File component consisting of one or two Control Stations and at least 2 datamover blades. In a VNX Unified upgrade, you first need to upgrade the File part of the system and afterwards the Block part. For the File upgrade, you need to select an .upg package. But… you can’t download this from the EMC/VCE website. Now what?
Last year Dell acquired EMC. EMC was rebranded to “Dell EMC” and moved under the Dell Technologies umbrella. In the last couple of months we could see the websites, emailing lists and Twitter accounts change from EMC to Dell EMC, etc. So it was inevitable that the EMC Elect program was going to change as well. In the meantime Dell also had an influencer program called the Dell Tech Centre Rockstars. Going forward, these two programs will merge and, as of today, be known as the Dell EMC Elect!
I will be attending Dell World this October in Austin, Texas and will be trying to find out how the merger between these massive companies will impact the Dell and EMC storage product portfolios. Flying in under the EMC Elect program, we should be having a front row seat to all the exciting announcements!
I had the opportunity to play with a new EMC product last week: ScaleIO. It’s definitely not a new EMC product (I troubleshooted the 1.31 version and EMC released 2.0 at EMC World 2016) but I just hadn’t had the honor to work with one of those systems yet. ScaleIO is a software-defined storage solution that uses the local disks in your commodity server and shares these out as block LUNs across the Ethernet. Which means this architecture can scale pretty well, both on capacity and performance, using hundreds (if not thousands) of servers and disks.
Today on February the 1st, EMC announced the EMC Elect 2016. I’m happy to again be part of the EMC Elect, now for the 4th year in a row!