Disk firmware upgrade

Hi Sam,

This is no doubt a very good question - in fact no question can be a stupid one and we all raise questions all the time and thus the need and justification of having the support forum.

The Disk firmware may not be available to you for download. The Disk Firmware upgrade needs to be done by EMC or EMC authorized service person as there are many precautions and steps to be taken and considered.

If you have service contract with EMC - you need not to worry about all these. If you have any issue or problem with the box - please feel free to engage EMC support any time. I wish the dial home is already configured which will log a case with CLARiiON Support team before you notice anything wrong. If there is any need to have Disk Firmware to be upgraded - EMC team will work with you to get this done.

Others may provide more details and experiences on this. Till then wish all a wonderful weekend.
Regards,
Sandip

Hello Sandip,

Thank you for your time to reply, appreciate it.

It sounds like the disk firmware upgrade is complex or complicated activity. Considering other OEMs providing the firmware and utilities to customers to do the firmware activity on their own, this is something new to me.

I guess about my second query, there is no such thing in FLARE to update the firmware of the replaced hard drive?

I like to make a quick clarification here - others may jump in freely.

CLARiiON will not upgrade/downgrade the Disk firmware or LCC (Link Control card) firmware when they are replaced.

However, please note that the firmware on the LCC (Link Control Card) and the disks get upgraded with a Flare upgrade, if there is any new revision of the appropriate firmware available.

There is also a seperate process to upgrade the FRUMON code for the LCC and Disk firmware - but as I mentioned earlier this needs to be done by EMC Authorized support person (in general).

With NST (Navisphere Service Task Bar) - you may find an option for "Upgrade Disk Firmware" in the Hardware Maintenance Tab - but this is for AX4-5 series array only. For CX or CX3 the disk firmware upgrade utility (FRUMON) is required and available only to EMC Customer Support Representative. You may refer to EMC Primus solution emc183890.

Also, if there is any issue found with any LCC or Disk firmware version, EMC notifies all customers through FCO and our Customer support team works with customers to get the firmware upgraded.

Hope this helps. But I must confess that, I am not really into the customer service activities - so if required others may correct me.

Thanks,
Sandip

nope, Clariion will not upgrade/downgrade drives when they get replaced. I just now looked at two drives on my CX600 that are identical capacity, speed and vendor, yet they have different Product Revision. Same applies to LCC, if one goes bad ..replacement will not downgrade not upgrade itself when it's inserted. I had issues with older PATA drives so my CE used a PBU package to push LCC/drive upgrades through your regular software upgrade wizard. It was an online process for me.

IMPORTANT - Please ignore my earlier post

Here are some clarifications and modifications to my earlier statement - many thanks to our EMC internal CLARiiON product engineering team who helped me on this. Please ignore my earlier post on this thread ...

LCC Firmware (FRUMON) is upgraded to a minimum firmware revision level when it is replaced (if it is below rev when inserted) and also during a Flare code upgrade.

LCC firmware is checked whenever an LCC powers up. If the array has a newer version of firmware then the LCC firmware (FRUMON) is flashed. However, please note if the array has older firmware (that means the replaced LCC has a newer firmware) - the existing firmware on the LCC is used - in other words LCC Firmware or FRUMON is Never gets downgraded.

There may be a few odd examples where LCC firmware was not upgraded during the Flare code upgrade (for ATA enclosures related to ATA BCC issues) ¿ in that case the FRUMON Code will be upgraded separately by the EMC Customer Engineer or authorized service person ¿ this is an Online NDU process.

Disk Firmware ¿ in general, there is no need to upgrade the disk firmware unless there is any issue. The disk firmware does NOT get upgraded (or downgraded) while replacing a faulty disk or during Flare Upgrade process. The only time EMC upgrades disk firmware is via a very specific field action (FCO) to do so as I mentioned earlier.

Disk firmware upgrade is currently an OFFLINE event. As I mentioned in my previous post, The NST utility provides an interface to upgrade disk firmware if that becomes necessary ¿ which is done by EMC Customer Engineer or authorized service personnel. You may refer to EMC Primus solution emc183890.

Hope this helps and clarifies all the doubts we had.

Many thanks to Sam for bringing up this excellent topic which has helped me to learn as well
Regards,
Sandip

Thank you Sandip for looking into this and getting clarifications from CLARiiON engineering.

Clarification about LCC firmware was added bonus to me. I didn't know about that, Thanks!

This makes me wonder about followings:

If we have 2 LCCs with different firmware versions. Will it be okay?

I wish there was firmware flash support in FLARE for hard drives like for LCC after replacement to the min rev.

I heard that it's always advisable to have same firmware on all drives. I don't know if it is true. However in case of a FCO or dealing with specific issue, it's understandable. So is it okay if hard drives have different firmware revision on a chassis?

Does EMC publish the release of new firmware to the customer to inform about FCO, bugs fixed etc. ?

Is there any best practice document(s) for these?