VNX OE for Block 05.33.006.5.096 (Salmon River) was just released with some major improvements to the VNX2. I have laid out some notes from the announcement that I am really excited about.
Small Dedupe Enhancement
The Force Deduplication enhancement allows users to initiate a deduplication on-demand, ignoring the 64GB threshold. Force Deduplication should not be used as a replacement for the normal schedule. A use case for forcing deduplication could be when enabling on many LUNs or migrating into dedupe enabled LUNs.
A LUN ownership warning triggers if the Optimal Deduplicated LUN SP Owner and the Default Owner are different. The Optimal Deduplicated LUN SP Owner field on the Storage Pool Properties, Deduplication tab provides visibility to the pool’s optimal deduplication owner.
New DAE for VNX 5400 and up
New hardware accompanies this release. The new 1.6TB eMLC drives is used for FAST VP storage tiers. The 120 drive 3U DAE (DAE8S) supports 120, 2.5″ drives. Initially the DAE8S supports the 100 GB, 200GB, 400GB, and 800GB and the 1.6TB 2.5″ SSD drives, the 300GB 15K disk drives and the 1.2TB 10K disk drives. Additional disk drives will be qualified in a future release.
The 120 drive trays can be used with any VNX5400 or higher so long as the total number of drive slots in the system does not exceed the system limit or 250 drive slots per back-end bus.
The VNX5200 does not support the DAE8S. Only the VNX8000 supports the DAE8S as the boot enclosure. There is a 250 drive slot limit per bus. Supports both x4 lane and high-bandwidth x8 lane SAS BE connectivity. Intermixing other DAE models is supported. (The DAE weighs 50 pounds (23kg) empty and 165 pounds (75kg) when fully loaded.)
Fast Cache Enhancements
FAST Cache performance is improved by changing the methods data is promoted into FAST Cache. The previous mechanism caused additional reads, thus utilizing more resources. The enhancement makes FAST Cache more efficient by directly promoting I/O that meets a new criteria.
Performance degradation in high parallelism and small sequential write (less than the MCC page size of 64K) environments is addressed in this release. To increase the concurrent write I/O, a virtual reference is used for the data transfer when the incoming write’s reference is busy.
New Power Supply
The target availability for the power supply is mid-April 2015. This is a 100-240VAC 1100W power supply intended to be an upgrade to systems with the 100-120VAC 800W power supply that need more power for additional I/O modules. The 100-120VAC power supplies are used in some geographies/facilities where there is no 200-240 supply. The new 100-240VAC power supply will provide these systems with the output needed to lift the I/O module limitations. The VNX8000 can use either the new PS or the existing 200-240 model.
The power supplies are not interchangeable, meaning the 100-240 cannot be used to replace a failed 100-120 PS or 200-240. The first PS detected during initial boot defaults to the systems PS model and other dissimilar PSs will be faulted. When upgrading from 100-120 to the new PS all I/O modules restrictions caused by the old PS are removed.
A Few Spare Notes
- This release has included the support for 16 Gb/s FC IO modules