Davoud Teimouri in News

What’s New in Dell EMC Unity OE 5.0.0.0.5.116

EMC has released Operating Environment for EMC Unity Platform. The new version is a major version and includes some new features. Also some problems have been fixed in this version.

EMC has been added support for Dell EMC Unity XT (Newest Unity family’s member). So this release is minimum version and basic requirement for Unity XT.

Let’s review the new features which added to this new version.

What’s New?

New Drive Support

With this release, all Unity Hybrid models now support 12 TB nearline SAS drives.

Automatic Clean-up of Resolved Health Alerts

In previous releases, the Alerts page showed all alerts for the system. With this release, the default view will show only active alerts that have not yet been resolved.

Enhanced Data Reduction

The data reduction feature has been enhanced to:

Add support for NFS and VMFS datastores.
Deduplicate uncompressed blocks for new writes or overwrites. Existing data does not change.
Support the following models:
- Dynamic or Traditional pools in Unity 380F, 480F, 680F, and 880F systems
- Dynamic pools in Unity All-Flash 450F, 550F, and 650F systems
- All-Flash pools in Unity Hybrid 380, 480, 680, and 880 systems

Drive Firmware Update After OE Upgrade

After you successfully upgrade the software Operating Environment (OE), and whenever new drive firmware is available and applicable to your system, you will see the option to automatically launch the Upgrade Drive Firmware wizard.

Deployment of ESRS Using RSA Credentials

Service personnel can now use their RSA credentials to help configure either Centralized or Integrated ESRS. This is especially helpful in the case where your support account may not be set up completely or correctly. Service personnel can enter their RSA credentials instead of customer Support Account credentials on the required steps during ESRS setup, or for some configuration changes.

ESRS Virtual Edition High Availability cluster support

With this release, Unity now supports ESRS clusters for high availability with Centralized ESRS. Unity now supports a secondary gateway in the same ESRS VE cluster as the primary gateway that Unity can switch to if the primary ESRS VE server fails over due to a connection or network issue.

Modify access for multiple hosts

You can now modify or delete access for multiple hosts simultaneously for a LUN or VMware datastore. To do this, use the new “Modify Host Access” menu item that was added to the More
Actions menu for LUNs and VMware datastores. This “Modify Host Access” menu item replaces the “Remove Host Access” menu item.
If the selected LUNs or VMware datastores have different host accesses, a Merge Host Access window opens that merges host access for all the selected LUNs or VMware datastores. For example, if some LUNs use Host1 and Host2, and others use Host5 and Host6, the Modify Host Access window will list all the hosts (Host1, Host2, Host5, and Host6) after the merge operation completes.

Capacity alarm thresholds have been added

Within a file system’s properties, you can now set capacity alarm thresholds for when Info, Warning, and Error alert messages are generated. The thresholds take effect after you click “Apply” in the File System Properties window. The range for all three alert thresholds is from 0 to 99, where 0 disables the alert. The Info
Threshold value (default of 0%) must be set to a value less than the Warning Threshold value. The Warning Threshold value (default of 75%) must be set to a value less than the Error Threshold value (default of 95%).

Drive enhancements

We have enhanced wear leveling and load balancing for dynamic pools in solid state drives to improve performance.

Advanced replication topologies for asynchronous file

Unity supports advanced replication topologies, that is, fan-out (1 to many) replication and cascading (multi-hop) replication for asynchronous file replication only. Fan-out supports a maximum of four asynchronous replication sessions on the same file storage. Cascaded replication replicates to another tier or level from an already replicated resource. Each cascade level can use fan-out replication for up to three additional sites. Each replication session has an independent Recovery Point Objective (RPO).
The existing replication operations are supported with some restrictions:

This feature only supports file storage objects using asynchronous replication and does not support block storage objects.
All systems joining the multiple sessions, either in fan-out (star) or cascaded mode, must be running OE version 5.x.
Snapshot replication can only be supported for one asynchronous session among all the sessions associated with the same storage object.
Only one loopback asynchronous session is supported per storage object

Cascade mode for third site asynchronous replication

When one synchronous replication session is created for MetroSync for Unity, a cascade replication session cannot be created from the destination side and only one remote asynchronous session should be created from the source. When a storage object is created as the destination mode and one asynchronous session is created on it as the destination, that storage object can be used to create another asynchronous session when it acts as the source.