Heads Up ! – EMC VNX2 – Potential Data Unavailability

I’m back from the wilderness ! Whenever I see an EMC ETA with the words “Potential Data Unavailability”, I give it immediate attention. Data. Is. Everything. This hot off the press item is titled “ETA 489936: VNX2: A firmware issue may cause certain solid state drives to become faulted, which Continue Reading

Heads Up ! – EMC VNX1 – Potential Data Unavailability during NDU

First time in a little while, but another EMC TA bulletin arrived in my inbox last week. The inclusion of “potential data unavailability” in the subject got my attention. Full release here This particular bulletin affects only VNX Series 1 Arrays (5300, 5500, 5700 and 7500) that are upgrading to Continue Reading

EMC- March Product Update roundup: VNX, VNX2, NaviSECCLI, RecoverPoint, USM

It’s been a busy month for software updates @ EMC. If you subscribe to the various product bulletins, you’d have seen this info, otherwise, READ on ! VNX1 https://support.emc.com/products/12781_VNX1-Series Updated Navisphere CLI (naviseccli), Unisphere Service Manager (USM), Unisphere Host Agent VNX2 https://support.emc.com/products/36656_VNX2-Series Updated Navisphere CLI (naviseccli), Unisphere Service Manager (USM), Unisphere Host Continue Reading

EMC – VNX/2 -Accurately show Storage Pool RAID Drive Counts with Naviseccli

A frequent topic on various EMC forums is how to layout Storage Pools according to EMC best practice, typically regarding about what Drive count to use in the RAID config. The best practice documents* is the source of truth for this when creating pools, but what about when you expand Continue Reading

EMC MCx FAST Cache : Where’d my Dirty Pages go?

The VNX2/MCx Array release by EMC in 2013 highlighted the whole “multi-core everything” (MCx) software upgrade to make best use of the available CPU cores in the Sandy Bridge Xeon E5 Processors. This allowed for greater parallelism of tasks and big performance improvements across Data services and functions. I’m not Continue Reading

EMC VNX/VNX2 – Naviseccli & Powershell – Bulk config changes with ease

GUI’s are generally cool, but when you need to get many of the same/similar tasks done, you can’t beat the speed and ease of using scripts and CLI based tools. I recently had a situation with a EMC VNX2 array where someone (or something) had caused all the LUNs in Continue Reading

EMC VNX/VNX2/VMAX: 600GB 15k Drive Increased failure rates – with fix.

This is the second time I have had EMA technical advisories recently regarding issues with 15k SAS disks. The first one I wrote about here. It doesn’t sound quite as serious as the last one (OMG, DATA LOSS), but worthy of a look and fix. Details; and full link here and excerpt Continue Reading