Dell EMC uses Secure Remote Services (SRS, formerly known as ESRS) to enhance the tech support experience for their products. There’s two sides to this support: connect home, and connect in. Connect home is your device itself dialing back home to Dell EMC to report various things such as errors, automatic support uploads, etc. If either of this results in a Service Request at Dell EMC, a engineer can then use SRS to dial in / connect in and have a look at the faulty system. The latter saves you from having to host a Webex session.
Dell EMC likes to have all Dell EMC systems connected to SRS, again for two reasons. First of all, it reduces the time spent by engineers in troubleshooting an issue. If an engineer can dial in himself, without having to negotiate a Webex session with the customer, that means more SRs per engineer per day and lower support costs for Dell EMC. Secondly, it will result in faster incident resolution, and thus a happier customer. The support engineer can look up the state of a defective drive independently, and order new parts while the customer is sleeping. Win-win!
Our company recently replaced a lot of VNX storage by new Dell EMC Unity all-flash arrays. Since we are/were primarily a VMware hypervisor house, we decided to go ahead and create the new LUNs as VMware VMFS (Block) LUNs/datastores. This however resulted hitting us a weird and unexpected replication limit at 64 sessions.
Today I visited a customer to connect two RecoverPoint clusters. One RecoverPoint cluster is connected to a Unity array, the other to a VNX. After installing both clusters, we ran the RecoverPoint Connect Cluster wizard and were greeted with an “Internal Error. Contact support” error message. Awesome! Fortunately it turned out to be a pretty basic error which was easy to fix. A short story about RecoverPoint installation types in mixed-array configurations…
Today EMC announced their new and improved mid-range storage at EMCWorld: say hello to Unity! It will be replacing the VNX1 and VNX2 systems with simple, modern flexible and affordable new platform and can be purchased in either an all-flash or hybrid configuration. There are quite a lot of differences between both the new Unity and the old VNX systems, with a number of improvements (available at GA or later) that make me really, really happy. Let’s dive in!