Varrow Blogs

It’s all over for the 146GB drives.  Last week EMC announced that the 146GB fibre channel disk drives will no longer be available for new Clariion and Celerra platforms.  I don’t see this as a huge deal to most customers but for some very specific applications the drives were very useful.  Some databases that we [...]

First, if your interested in the new Cisco UCS blade system and haven’t checked out the Varrow channel on YouTube lately, you should.  We’ve added several new videos from a customer while doing their UCS install.  Pretty neat stuff.
Just finished up another video for our collection.  This one walks you through configuring Fibre Channel over [...]

For those that are inquisitive, I get a lot of questions on the mysterious layout of the Vault Drives within the Clariion Series Arrays. The Vault drives are an area of the Clariion for software and configuration information. The space is reserved on drives 0-4 in enclosure 0 on bus 0. 62G worth of space [...]

For those that are inquisitive, I get a lot of questions on the mysterious layout of the Vault Drives within the Clariion Series Arrays. The Vault drives are an area of the Clariion for software and configuration information. The space is reserved on drives 0-4 in enclosure 0 on bus 0. 62G worth of space is allocated to this private area on each Vault Drive. Consequently, on all other drives user space starts at 34MB as noted here…

One other common focus of the Vault drives is the write cache dump area. During a period of power loss to the array, the contents of the write cache get dumped to this reserved area. Therefore protecting any active writes that have yet been committed to disk.

So in a more granular sense, here is how this discreet area is partitioned…

• 
• PSM LUN or Persistent Storage Manager- 2GB trimmings, triple mirrored on the first 3 disks
• SP and FLARE Boot partition: 45GB, mirrored for each SP
• The Cache Vault area: to save contents of write cache
• The Image Repository: 5.5GB per disk, triple mirrored on disks 0, 1, and 4
• Utility Partition: 3GB, mirrored for each SP

Hope that helps..for additional info please visit the following excellent sites below. 

And btw…after reading Devang’s post and comments I finally got an answer to my post, Clariion FLARE Revision Breakdown. Specifically what the “5” signifies across all FLARE code Designations…I feel better..

[D] Stands for Software Distribution Type
0 - Debug Private
1 - Debug Frozen
2 - Retail Private
3 - Retail Frozen
4 - Early Access
5 - General Release
6 - Special

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Last week we had a client that needed a replacement disk drive for an older EMC Clariion array.  Now this is by no means anything complicated but the drive needed wasn’t available anymore.  The questions was posed, “ Can you mix 15k and 10k fibre channel drives in the same RAID group?”  Hmmmmm, I hadn’t [...]

Frankly, this post is a bit narcissistic.  Digging for this data at time of need is becoming a bit weary,  so hence the quickie. Includes CX4 and CX3 models…
By the way, these were generated from the Clariion Procedure Generator, if you aren’t using this tool then you aren’t working efficiently. Download below, Powerlink account [...]

Every once and a while at client meeting the discussion about Flash Drives or Solid-State Drives (SSD) comes up.  Flash drives are now an option in EMC’s Clariion arrays.  Usually the first question is “I heard they’re expensive, what do those things cost anyway?”  Well the short answer is A LOT.   Retail from EMC is [...]