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Tonight I have started the process of converting my own CX300 to a CX3-20c.  (yay!  upgrading from SERIOUSLY out-of-date hardware to MODERATELY out-of-date hardware, right?)

Why?  Because it’s there.  Since EMC doesn’t offer free training to sub-sub-sub-contractors such as myself, it falls to me to learn what I can where I can. 

Besides.  It’s fun.

So far it’s been pretty simple.  Printed out the 63 page guide from the Clariion Proceedure Generator, and was briefly intimidated by it before I realized that 80% of it is completely useless.

But, because I want the experience, I’m going through each step of it.

First thing I did was backed up the vault pack.  This particular CX300 has no data on it, so it was a simple process to swap the five vault drives on at a time.  Though in the interest of doing it gracefully, I did bind a 1G lun across the five drives so that I could use the proactive sparing to gracefully remove each drive.  (The option isn’t available unless you have a bound lun on the raid group)

Obviously I want to come out of this with a working CX300 as well as the CX3-20.   (And of course my fear is ending up with not one but TWO doorstops at the end of this process)

Ran CRC2.  Interesting application, might come in handy in the future, because  when it comes down to it, it gives you a LOT of information about your clariion that you don’t get from the GUI.

Luckily this is a situation where there isn’t anything i need to keep on the array.  One thing stands out though, I had to delete the little 1G lun I bound on the vault pack to get the CRC2 check to pass, because apparently a number of the system partitions need to expand.  (Life would have sucked if I didn’t have the ability to wipe the drives)

After deleting the 1G lun, CRC2 passed and all was good with the world.

Skipped the next 6 pages, which describe how to make room in the rack for the new equipment.

Why?

Let’s just say rack-space really isn’t the issue here.

So the only thing I wasn’t able to find was a copy of EMCRemote.  Though I have an older one from back in my EMC days, hopefully the protocols haven’t changed much.  <crosses fingers>

So Unisphere Service Manager (Formerly Navisphere Service TaskBar) is installed, and the first step is to install the target platform conversion-prep software.  A pretty straight-forward install.  Once this package is installed you’re comitted. (or should be)

I had a bit of a worry loading the conversion-image, SPB didn’t come back before USM timed out…which seems like something that might just happen in these older, slower devices, right? 

The ConversionPrep, ConversionImage, and most importantly, the new Utility partition all seem to have installed correctly, as with the HSConversionB package. 

Now sadly, there are no descriptions as to what each NDU does, though logically:

ConversionPrep handles the settings – one of the things that you verify after the ConversionPrep is loaded is that write-cache is disabled (which it always was because I don’t have a SPS cable for this model) and such.

ConversionImage and Utility Partition are pretty self-explanitory, the CX3 looks for things in different places, requires different drivers, etc. 

HSConversionB was the stumper.  HardwareSwap?  Any ideas?

Last step was to shut-down the array.  This will be my stopping point. 

Stay tuned, same bat-time, same bat-rss-feed.

Brocade bought SBS.

I don’t know how many of you happen to have looked at the resume I had posted – but I spent a couple of years at Strategic Business Systems (www.sbsplanet.com).

I’m not sure what Brocade is hoping to get out of this.  SBS doesn’t do sales, and doesn’t even really have any influence in the buying process.

SBS has been a pretty successful company – grown by leaps and bounds.  I would never go back to them because they wield their non-compete agreement like a battle-axe and use every opportunity as a chance to hook someone in.

The real problem is that Brocade as a switch manufacturer is on it’s way out.  From a 90% install base they really have nowhere to go but down, and Cisco is gaining very quickly.

I’m not a big fan of Brocade.  I have a brocade switch in my home SAN not because of any preference, but because they are cheap on Ebay.   Their ASIC’s are slow and their licensing is oppressive.

Does this make sense to anyone?

I’m into this discussion on storagezilla’s new site ( storagezilla.typepad.com ) and it kind of brought out an issue I had today.

I’m onsite in North Carolina (still – unforutnately) and I’m working with the customer to get ahold of the DST patches (part of the reason for my last post….) for ControlCenter.  So I do what any EMC person would do right?

I ask the customer to log into powerlink and download it because I DON’T HAVE ACCESS TO THE DOWNLOADS!

I’m sorry, was I yelling?   Yes, I actually had to ask the customer to log in and download something because EMC doesn’t trust their trusted partner with full access to powerlink.

The customer actually commented that it was pretty sad that EMC trusts me to go to a customer site and manipulate their storage and sensitive data, but they didn’t trust me with their own software.

It is pretty pathetic isn’t it?