Dell Unity™ Family Configuring SupportAssist

SupportAssist and security

SupportAssist employs multiple security layers throughout each step in the remote connectivity process to ensure that you and Support can use the solution with confidence:

• All notifications originate from your site—never from an outside source—and are kept secure by using Advanced Encryption Standard (AES)-256-bit encryption.
• IP-based architecture integrates with your existing infrastructure and maintains the security of your environment.
• Communications between your site and the Support Center are bilaterally authenticated using RSA® digital certificates.
• Only authorized Customer Service professionals that are verified using two-factor authentication can download the digital certificates that are needed to view a notification from your site.

When RSC (Remote Secure Credentials) is enabled, Dell Support personnel can remotely log in as a special service user by using a unique dynamic RSA passcode from a strictly controlled Dell backend portal. The passcode is only valid for a 30 minute period and is authenticated by Dell backend servers. Once the authentication process passes, the user is given both administrator and service roles when running UEMCLI commands, and the service role when running on-array CLI commands. All remote user login and logout activities with RSC passcode are audit logged.

SupportAssist management

You can manage SupportAssist using Unisphere, UEMCLI, or the REST API. You can enable or disable the service and change the settings for a global proxy server.

The Connect Directly SupportAssist feature is embedded in the operating environment (OE) of the storage system as a managed service. The Connect Directly implementation includes the High Availability (HA) feature, which provides monitoring of SupportAssist and is responsible for failing it over from the primary storage processor (SP) to the backup SP should the primary SP fail. If it fails, HA is responsible for restarting SupportAssist. The OE is responsible for persisting the configuration and certificates that are needed for SupportAssist to work.

The Connect through a Gateway Server SupportAssist feature allows you to configure both a Primary gateway and a Secondary gateway to allow for high availability (HA) within the Support Connect Gateway cluster on the network. If the primary gateway goes down, the Unity system automatically fails over to the secondary gateway on the network for SupportAssist and APEX AIOps Observability connectivity. Configuration of the primary gateway is mandatory, while configuration of the secondary gateway is optional.

SupportAssist is only supported on the primary SP when it is in normal mode. SupportAssist is not supported in service mode.

SupportAssist communication

Access to a DNS server is required for SupportAssist to work.

If a global proxy server is configured and the user selects to use the global proxy settings, SupportAssist attempts to use the configured proxy server to communicate with the Support Center back-end systems. If a global proxy server is not configured or is not selected to be used, SupportAssist attempts to communicate directly to the Support Center back-end systems.