We recently updated our storage arrays from SCOS 6.7.11 to 7.1.4.4 and are taking advantage of the new features in this upgrade. After upgrading Dell Storage Manager 2016 R3 (formerly Enterprise Manager) the interface has some new features as well. DSM now has the ability to remotely manage Equallogic PS Groups and Remote Storage Centers as before this was in the web interface. Replays have also been renamed to snapshots as to keep uniformity between VMware and Dell Storage Center OS. Overall, both storage arrays upgrades took anywhere between 38 minutes and 45 minutes with non-services affecting updates. Which means no downtime. Although, I cannot remember the last time I did have an service affecting update from Storage Center. One great new feature in SCOS 7.1 is the ability to have Deduplication with Compression on each volume to really save bytes and improves performance especially when Replications (Snapshots) are being utilized.

The issues I ran into were related to Replay Manager. Currently, we are running Replay Manager 7.5 (Newest version is 7.7) and I ran into issues post-upgrade. The schedule jobs returned a failure warning via email notification. After a bit of trouble shooting, I created a dedicated Replay Manager account in Storage Center to run all the scheduled Replay Manager jobs. This seemed to fix the issue. Overall, I’m very happy with this release not to mention the storage savings due to the deduplication with compression.

For Dell SC4020 DSM 2016 R3 Release Notes click here. For Dell Storage Center 7.1 Release Notes click here. For more information about Dell Storage Arrays visit: www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/category/storage-products/disk-arrays

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