Comments on: EMC Clariion firmware upgrades include hidden gems

By: dave w

dave w — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 15:14:38 +0000

You are not kidding in saying upgrading from two versions back is a painstaking effort. A year or so ago I had the opportunity to do just that. We had CX600′s that were running FLARE 13 that were experiencing issues with consistently loosing many drives every week or so. Of course support kept telling us that we needed to get to the current release and the issue should go away. Current release at that time was 19 which meant we had to actually do 2 upgrades. The first to 14 and then another to 19. The FLARE upgrade was no big deal…however, upgrading/updating all of the attached servers was an excrutiatingly slow process. We had about 200 servers of varying OS’s, Solaris, Linux, HP-UX, Windows, VMWare, Novell. Did I mention that we were a healthcare facility? We were not allowed ANY downtime…even for upgrades. And every application was considered critical? Well aren’t they all? Anyway the upgrading of all the servers was the big issue as we had to schedule downtimes not only for the server updates/upgrades of PowerPath, Navisphere, HBA firmware and drivers and while we were at it any OS patches needed. But then againlater on to do the actual FLARE upgrades themselves.
I tell you what…after that experience, never again will I ever allow any equipment I am responsible for get behind in it’s code.
By the way…the disk issues did not go away and it was found that they were being caused by back end issues related to the LCC (link control cards) and cabling. More downtime to replace those as well. Go figure…

By: Dave M

Dave M — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 22:20:52 +0000

Just a quick follow up comment… I have to take off my “engineer hat” and remember that customers don’t always have the same access as service folks do. If I’m not mistaken, a customer cannot upgrade directly from FLARE 14 to 24 or 26, but an Engineer can. However, I think customers are still OK to go from 16, 17 or 19 to 24 or 26 without any special access.

By: Dave M

Dave M — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 20:47:18 +0000

You’re right – newer versions of the CLARiiON FLARE code do contain some nice new features. However, I just wanted to correct the statement you made in your last paragraph about upgrading from older generations of FLARE.

Most CLARiiON arrays can be upgraded from FLARE release 14 directly to release 24 or 26 without any interim steps.

For instance, a CX500 could go from FLARE 14, 16, 17 or 19 directly to FLARE 24 or 26 without any issue. There are some caveats depending on the array model and whether or not it contains any ATA shelves, etc. But for the most part, there really isn’t any extra time involved.

Of course, the CX200, CX400 and CX600 can only support up to FLARE 19. If you’re still running one of these older arrays, you’re probably paying too much for maintenance and missing out on all the new bells & whistles. Bite the bullet and purchase a fancy new CX3!