Hello Jeff,

Yes it can take that long to complete your upgrade just like some of the other people have stated.  If you are doing the upgrade while in production it will take longer than if you were able to take the system out of production to do the upgrade.  Also one thing that you can do to shorten the time is that if you can limit the amount of I/O that is accessing the system.  When the Compellent system reboots it takes about 10-15 minutes to come back up fully so that is a big part of your time is waiting for the controller to come back up after it reboots.  

Please let us know if you have any other questions.

Like anything that is customized for hardware, it depends. Are you doing a service effecting update or not? Are the drives older or newer? The actual update of the OS does NOT take 6 hours to complete; however after updating to 6.5.20 there is another update right behind it that usually takes place so it will involve another round of reboots and such.  In total the last time I ran the update it took around 2.5 hours and I did NOT have a lot of disk firmware to update (which takes a long time).

If you have multiple systems to update then that is probably how that 6 hour number was calculated. Keep in mind the time it takes per reboot on a SC8000/ R720 to just post.

Thanks. All my disks had their last firmware update about 1.5 years ago. I am thinking of pausing async replication during the update just to limit as much Iops as I can, though I know I can run on one controller with replication still going--I do 15 min replays with 1 hour expirations which is what jacks my Iops up.

I did a 6.3 -> 6.4 -> 6.5.20 a few months ago.

I can confirm it takes quite a while. (Took about 12 hours in total)

Keep in mind, the updates for the SCOS actually includes regular firmware updates for the SC8000.

This firmware is applied using the DRAC interface, which can be a rather time-consuming  task.

furthermore, the system reboots several times - this adds a significant amount of time to the project.

Note: You can do a upgrade on both controller at the same time; this is half the upgrade-time, but you will be offline during the upgrade.

Keep in mind; If you are using VMWare and iSCSI connections - you will have a minor IO stall during the upgrade.

The reason for this, is that the Compellent aray is NOT an ALUA array; Only ONE controller at the time can take owner ship of the LUNs, and paths are only visible on ONE controller.

During the upgrade process, the controller will failover paths to the partner controller - how-ever, VMWare will need to realise this before performing the failover... this will usually cause a 30 seconds IO delay.

Sorry for the late reply!! We actually had to go to a key customer release of 6.5.30. That took about 2.5 hours. But we still have 11 enclosure firmware and 12 disk firmware pending that we need to do. Supposedly that is only about 2 hours. I hope that will go ok :)