vault drive Archives - FastStorage

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

Everything Storage

In 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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CLARiiON and VNX Data Erasure – DIY edition

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Everything Storage

Over the last couple of months I’ve been busy phasing out an old EMC CLARiiON CX3 system and migrating all the data to either newer VNX and/or Isilon systems. The hard work paid off: the CX3 is now empty and we can start to decommission it. But before we ship it back to EMC we need to employ a type of CLARiiON data erasure to make sure data doesn’t fall into wrong hands.

Update 2019-01: You can also use these commands on a VNX. I’ve updated the post with several additional screenshots and fixed a few typo’s.

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VNX Uptime Bulletin Q3 2013

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EMC sends out a VNX Uptime Bulletin every quarter to update customers on best practices and fixes which will help you in achieving the maximum possible uptime and robustness for your VNX. You can subscribe to them as you would to with any other ETA (EMC Technical Advisory): log in at http://support.emc.com, go to Support by Product, open your product page (in this case the VNX) and click “Get Advisory Alerts” to subscribe. This bulletin discusses pools and LUN ownership, vault drives, software versions, etc.

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VNX – Storage pools spanning DAE 0_0

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Everything Storage

Anyone working in IT knows that there are usually enormous amounts of whitepapers available to help you install, configure and run a new system or software suite. The fun more than doubles when the whitepapers start conflicting themselves. But even when they’re crystal clear, sometimes you run into a different problem: budget! With all planning and designing done, sometimes the budget or the purchased equipment does not allow you to follow ALL best practices to the letter, or at least make it a bit more challenging. In this example there’s the need to span a storage pool across DAE 0_0.

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CLARiiON CX3 vault drive failure

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Everything Storage

Yesterday I received a call about a drive failure in a CLARiiON CX3-80 storage array. Since every system has at least a couple of hot spares configured, usually this does not pose a problem. But this drive failure happened on drive position 0_0_0: a vault drive failure.

The vault drives host (amongst others) the operating system and configuration of the storage array. They are also used to destage the write cache in case of an event that might threaten data integrity.

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