What’s new in EMC Clariion CX4 FLARE 29

Along with the release of FAST, EMC also released a new version of it’s CLARiiON Fibre Logic Array Runtime Environment, or in short “FLARE” operating environment. This release brings us to version 04.29 and offers some interesting enhancements, so I thought I’d give you an overview of what’s in there:

Let’s start off with some basics. Along with this update you will find updated firmware versions for the following:

Enclosure: DAE2		- FRUMon: 5.10
Enclosure: DAE2-ATA	- FRUMon: 1.99
Enclosure: DAE2P	- FRUMon: 6.69
Enclosure: DAE3P	- FRUMon: 7.79

Major changes:

• VLAN tagging for 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s iSCSI interfaces.
• Support for 10Gb/s dual port optical I/O modules.
• Spin down support for storage system and/or RAID group. Once enabled drives spin down automatically if no user or system I/O has been recognized for 30 minutes. These SATA drives support spin down:
  • 00548797
  • 00548853
  • 00548829
• Shrinking of a FLARE and meta LUNs. Note that this is only supported on Windows hosts that are capable of shrinking logical disks.
• Upgrade of UltraFlex I/O modules with an increased performance, more specifically 8Gb FC and 10Gb iSCSI. Note that only an upgrade is supported, a downgrade from for example 8Gb FC to 4Gb FC will not work.
• Rebuild logging is now supported on RAID6 LUNs, which means that a drive that may have been issuing timeouts will have it’s I/O logged and rebuild only the pending writes.
• The maximum number of LUNs per storage group have been upgraded from 256 for all CX4 models with FLARE 28 to the following:
  • CX4-120 – 512
  • CX4-240 – 512
  • CX4-480 – 1024
  • CX4-960 – 1024

You can find an overview with the supported connectivity options and front-end and back-end ports right here.