Upgrading CX3-10 to CX4-240 without losing data

Yes, it is possible to do a Data-in-place (DIP) array upgrade/conversion from a CX3-10 to a CX4-240 as long as you do not have ATA drives in the Vault (first five drives) location. If you have ATAs in the Vault then you can only upgrade to a CX4-120.

When you purchase the DIP conversion kit to go to a CX4-240 there will be an upgrade service charge in your purchase that includes either EMC or an ASN partner doing the upgrade work. The DIP does require some overall downtime, but will keep all of your data.

Hello,

I have the OS disk on FC and the rest of the DAE are SATA drives. 

Hello,

I am pretty new to this DIP technology. We are planning to buy CX4-240 controller, If you can help me with rough idea on the price with DIP feature and without DIP it would be really great help. Thanks

Bonnu

Physical re-racking for DAEs is outside the scope of the DIP service that comes with the DIP kit purchase. Also out of scope is any LUN migration, swapping of vault drives or host remediation. If re-racking needs to be done it will need to be discussed with the account team and customer service or professional services. EMC or an ASN partner can perform any of these tasks for the customer, however they will probably be billable since they are outside of the DIP conversion fixed service offering that comes with the DIP kit purchase. The account team can provide quotes for additional services desired.

Bonnu,

If you want to upgrade the CX3-10 to a CX4-240 you need to purchase the ugprade (the DIP or Data In Place upgrade) not just go out and purchase CX4-240 controllers. The upgrade option includes the new controllers and the services for performing the upgrade. You will need to contact you local sales rep or reseller for the prices. The upgrade will also require downtime, it can take 8-12 hours to upgrade the array and it is an offline process so all hosts will have to be shutdown during the upgrade process. It will keep all your data in place though so once the upgrade is complete you only need to power up your hosts and they will see the LUNs like nothing changed.

bonnu06 wrote: Hello, I am pretty new to this DIP technology. We are planning to buy CX4-240 controller, If you can help me with rough idea on the price with DIP feature and without DIP it would be really great help. Thanks Bonnu

Another thing to factor in the down time is you may need to re-rack the entire SAN.  The CX3-10 with SPS uses 2U of rack space.  when you go to the CX4-240, you will need 3U of space.  So unless you left a 1U empty space in the bottom of your rack when the CX3-10 was installed, you are going to have to unrack everything and move it up 1U.

It sucks.  i have done it many times....

Oh and you personally wont have to rerack it, that is for the engineer that comes out to do:)

Just something to think about with the time.  the actuall upgrade of the OS and converting it over still takes +6 hours.  then you need to add racking time.

So when i do this DIP upgrade i don't need to do any migrations right like LUN migrations with in the array. I am just concerened about the data loss. Can yoy let me know if any?

The  existing CX3-10 has 4 DAEs and am sure we might get 1 or 2 more new DAE's  so adding the new ones causes any issues?

Hello Jen,

I guess we are not going for a new CX4-240. We want to keep all our DAE's and disks and just wanted to update the CX3-10 with the same configuration. After your reading i hope we need to go for DIP upgrade. So if we go with DIP upgrade will there be an EMC employee helping us or we need to take care of the upgrade.

DIPs will be performed by either EMC or an ASN partner. They are not customer installable.

The CX3-10 uses 33GB worth of private space from each of the vault drives. This private space for CX4 increased, which uses 62GB of contiguous free space on each of the first five drives for private space. You will need to have unallocated contiguous free space large enough to accommodate this change on your first five drives. if you do not have this available contiguous free space you will need to use LUN Migrate to move some of the LUNs to another location prior to the migration. If you give your account team an SP Collect they can check and see if you need to do this or any other array based preparation work prior to the DIP. The only other time that you might need to move LUNs is if you are a Celerra NAS Gateway on your CX3-10 and the control and DART LUNs are on the first five drives. If you have this configuration then you need to move the LUNs for the DIP, but once it is complete you can move them back providing there is room.

One other condition that could come up is if you have drives in the vault that are too small, like 36GB disks. These would not have enough space to accomidate the required private space. If this is the case you would need to physically swap out the drives prior to the DIP.

Have you account team run a CRC (Conversion Readiness Check) to determine any issues. All they need is for you to provide them with SP Collects.

I also want to point out that if you disconnect the DAEs and Disks from the CX3-10 and just move them over to the CX4-240 that the data will not be retained. The CX4-240 will recognize the disks as blank.

I guess we have enough rackspace so reracking is not a neccessary thing and when it comes to vault space we have enough space for new CX4-240 OS to accomodate wo there wont be any migration involved. I guess we will go with the DIP kit itself.

One last thing if any one can provide a rough figurein inorder to calcualte our budget that would be really great help........

Sorry, I do not have pricing. You can work with your account team to get the numbers.

A DIP conversion kit gets you some new hardware like new SPs and a few other things, but no DAEs or Disks. With a DIP the SPs of the CX3-10 essentially get swapped out with the new CX4-240 SPs. You keep all of your other hardware (DAEs and Disks) so the existing configuration such as the RAID Groups and LUNs are preserved and the data is retained. The idenity of your array stays the same as well. It retains the WWPNs so you do not have to do the host reconfiguration or new zoning that you would have to do if purchasing a completely new CX4-240 array and doing a data migration. You may still need to update some of the host software like HBA drivers, agent or PowerPath software.

If you are getting a completely new CX4-240 array then you will need to do a data migration from the CX3-10 to the CX4-240 with something like SAN Copy, MirrorView, Open Migrator/LM or other host based migration tools.

For more information see the following white papers on Powerlink:

White Paper: Upgrading to EMC CLARiiON CX4 Series Storage Systems — Applied Technology

White Paper: Strategies for Migrating Data to EMC CLARiiON Storage Systems — Applied Technology