A few weeks ago, the EMC Celerra NS-120 was upgraded to DART 6 and FLARE 30, in that order.  Before I get on with this post, let me just say that Unisphere is the bomb and offers at least a few opportunities for complimentary writing to give it the praise it truely deserves.  My hat is off to EMC, they answered the call (or was it the screams?) for unified management of unified storage. 

What was my opinion of the old sauce? 

• Navisphere for CLARiiON block storage management was ok although it had a few bugs which forced a need to resort to NaviCLI once in a while.  Other than that, it looked old and was in need of a face/efficiency lift.  I’ve manged a few enterprise arrays from other vendors which have this same feel.  The biggest problem there being no end in sight of lackluster management or performance gathering tools.  Some vendors seem content with what they’ve always had which leads me to a few conclusions:
  • They don’t use their own software
  • The expectation is to use the CLI only
  • Hardware vendors can have outstanding hardware components but that doesn’t make them software developers
  • EMC has bumped it up a notch, at least with Unisphere – I can’t speak to Symmetrix management as I have no experience there
• Celerra Manager for management of the Data Movers/iSCSI/NFS/CIFS was bug free, but very slow at times, particularly at first login.
• Seasoned CLARiiON and Celerra TCs (as well as NetApp pros) might laugh at my tendancy to rely on GUI tools, but management of the storage is so few and far between, relearning CLI when a seldom task needs to be performed isn’t precious time well spent unless the tasks are going to be repeated often enough.

I’ve had some legacy Celerra software CDs sitting next to me in my den for several months (Navisphere, Celerra Network Server, etc.) and I will have no problem banishing them to the basement, probably not to be touched again until the next time the basement is cleaned out.  So look for some positive Unisphere posts from me in the future as I get the time.

Getting back on topic…  Earlier today I had finished taking a look at Nicholas Weaver’s SRM video.  Later, I was in the lab playing around with the EMC Celerra UBER VSA 3.2 (it’s the latest craze, you really must check it out).  I noticed a Unisphere feature Nicholas highlighted in his video which I don’t have on the Celerra NS-120’s build of Unisphere – the ability to federate storage array management in Unisphere via single pane of glass.

The Uber VSA has the ability to snap in multiple storage arrays into the Unisphere dashboard by way of an Add button:

The Add button is missing in the Celerra NS-120’s build of Unisphere:

The DART versions match at 6.0.36-4, however, the outstanding difference appears to be the Client Revision.  What’s worth pointing out is that the Add feature exists in the older client revision found in the Uber VSA, but is missing in the newer client revision found on the Celerra NS-120 which was upgraded a few weeks ago.

I’m not sure if federation of multiple arrays was purposely removed by design or if it was an oversight, but it would be nice to get it back.  I should also point out that although federation appears to be missing for multiple arrays, it still exists and consolidates management intra of unified storage arrays consisting of CLARiiON block and the Celerra iSCSI/NFS/CIFS.

Update 3/4/11:  The Celerra NS-120 is now running DART 6.0.40-8, FLARE 04.30.000.5.511,7.30.10 (4.1), and Unisphere V1.0.0.14.  The Add feature to tie in multiple EMC storage frames into a single view is still missing.

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