I don’t have the latest and greatest Dell Compellent SC8000 controllers or SC220 2.5″ drive enclosures in my home lab although I dream nightly about Santa unloading some on me this Christmas. What I do have is an older Series 20 and I am thankful for that. But having an older storage array doesn’t mean I cannot leverage some of the latest and greatest features and operating systems available for datacenters.
Storage Center 5.6 was released just a short time ago and it ushers in some feature and platform support currently built into Storage Center 6.x as well as a large number of bug fixes. This is a big win for me and anyone with 32-bit system (Series 30 or below) needing these features because SCOS 6.x is 64-bit only for Series 40 and newer which today includes the SC8000.
So what are these new features in 5.6 and why am I so excited? I’m glad you asked. For this guy, and on top of the list, it’s full support of all VAAI primitives. Storage Center 5.5 and older boasted support of the block zeroing primitive. Space Reclamation was there as well although that primitve alone did not satisfy the other component of the thin provisioning primitive which was STUN.
Shown below a Storage Center 5.5 datastore where I lack Atomic Test and Set (aka Hardware Assisted Locking) and XCOPY. I have block zeroing and Space Reclamation using the Free Space Recovery agent for vSphere guest VMs using physical RDMs. VAAI support status can be obtained in full using esxcli:
Or in part using the vSphere Client GUI:
After the Storage Center 5.6 upgrade, I’ve got additional VAAI primitive support where Clone in most cases is going to be the biggest one in terms of fabric and host efficiency and performance. Not shown is support for Thin Provisioning Stun but that has been added as well:
The vSphere Client GUI now reflects full VAAI support after the 5.6 upgrade:
What else? Added support for vSphere 5.5 as an operating system type:
Last but not least, added support for Windows 2012 and some of its features including Offloaded Data Transfer, Thin Provisioning, Space Reclamation, and Server Objects:
Storage Center 5.6 also adds new storage features which are storage host agnostic such as Background Media Scans (BMS) as well as improved disk and HBA management for server objects. And the bug fixes I mentioned earlier – refer to the SCOS 5.6 Release Notes for details.
To wrap this up, if you’ve got an older Storage Center model and you want support for these new features while avoiding a forklift upgrade, Storage Center Operating System 5.6 is the way to go.
