Rick Gouin

Tag: Compellent

Dell SC End of Life

· Rick Gouin

Dell SC, perhaps better known as Compellent, has finally had its end of life formally announced.  I feel like many people have been watching for this since the acquisition of EMC was announced in 2015.  At that time, Dell suddenly found itself with numerous overlapping storage platforms and product teams.  Jeff Clarke, COO at Dell, explained it well here: “It was to the point where you had fierce supporters of a brand or a product inside the organization and we were not necessarily stepping back and looking at market needs, customer needs and technology trends. My view 15 months ago, […]

Hardening Dell Storage Center (SC) – Compellent

· Rick Gouin

Over the last year or so, I’ve helped multiple companies recover from ransomware events utilizing snapshots on their storage arrays.  In several of these instances, the customer’s backups were compromised along with their production environment.  A storage array can be a nice part of a recovery strategy, as they seem to be targeted less frequently than other parts of your data-center. If you want to help make sure that your storage array is there for you when you need it, however, you need to make sure it is as secure as possible.  Most of these steps are applicable to any […]

Dell EMC SC Series Veeam Plugin Now Available!

· Rick Gouin
veeam logo

This has to be one of the most commonly requested integrations for SC. It seems like every time I talk about SC with a customer, they ask about Veeam integration. After what seems like a very long wait, the SC Storage Integration for Veeam is finally available! What this plugin does is orchestrate the SC snapshot engine so you can leverage the space efficient snapshots built into SC as part of your backup strategy. This enables the direct-SAN backup method within Veeam, essentially offloading some of your storage tasks to the SC array itself. There are some requirements:– SCOS 7.4.2 […]

Storage Center 7.3 (Compellent)

· Rick Gouin

Storage Center (Compellent) Operating System version 7.3 became generally available last month.  Its been rolling through the various stages of release all summer, and I now have some customers on it.  There are so many improvements in this release that I had to take a moment to talk about it.  This release probably should have been a 7.5, its one of the biggest updates we’ve seen in a while. So whats new?  Lets look at a few of the biggest updates: The Web GUI is back!  And its not Java anymore!  A while ago, Dell did away with the old […]

Dell Releases New SC5020

· Rick Gouin

I previously blogged about the release of the SC7020, which is part of the “odd number refresh” that has now added the SC5020.  By this, I mean that it appears the even numbered SC platforms (SCv2000, SC4020, SC8000) will be refreshed via odd numbered platforms, of which we now have details on 3 of them: SC5020, SC7020, and SC9000. At Dell EMC World 2017 in Las Vegas this week, Dell announced the availability of the SC5020.  Its available for quoting any day now, and will start shipping in June 2017. What are the promises? Up to 45 percent more IOPS, […]

Dell Releases New SC7020

· Rick Gouin

** UPDATE ** This platform is no longer unified.  Dell has removed the ability for the SC7020 to provide NAS services.  The system has also had its scalability limited from a drive count perspective.  Now at 500 drives.  I will keep my comments on these changes to myself.   *** A couple weeks back, Dell made a new storage platform available with very little fanfare.  This new array, the SC7020, is positioned as a refresh for the SC8000 series.  You may recall this post, where we talk about how the SC9000 is not meant to replace the SC8000.  This is […]

Whats new in SCOS 7.0?

· Rick Gouin

Dell recently announced the release of SCOS 7.0.  SCOS is the Storage Center Operating System, which is the software that runs Dells SC storage line, including the SCv2000, SC4020, SC8000, and SC9000, with more to come soon.  These are the products that were formerly known as Compellent.  Check out the announcement from Alan Atkinson (GM of Dell Storage) here.  So whats new?  There are a few things in this release that long time Compellent users have been anticipating for quite some time.  Lets chat about a few. Dedupe.  The Compellent line already does compression, and we see pretty good returns […]

New Dell SC9000 – Revolutionary or Evolutionary?

· Rick Gouin

Dell released the Dell SC9000 at Dell World 2015 in Austin TX this week. The SC9000 is the new high end Compellent controller, a space currently occupied by the SC8000. Much of the messaging I’ve consistently heard around the new Dell SC9000, however, is that it is not a replacement for the SC8000.  In fact, the SC8000 will continue to be available side by side with the SC9000 for quite some time. The new SC9000 has a lot of improvements over the previous controller from a hardware perspective, but it is really a discrete offering?  Or is it really just […]

Compellent SCv2000 Series

· Rick Gouin

Dell announced the SCv2000 series storage arrays back in May of 2015.  I’m a bit late to the party here, but I wanted to wait until I had actually had the opportunity to integrate several of these systems into customer environments. These systems start at about $10k via the Dell website, so there has been a lot of interest in this one. I’ve read a few articles suggesting that the SCv2000 series is aimed to replace the Equallogic product line, but after spending some time with the product and its pricing, I think it is more directly targeting certain portions […]

Generic Compellent Replay and Mounting Script

· Rick Gouin

I feel like I’ve had to write and re-write this script repeatedly as I’ve needed it for various customers and tasks.  Today I figured I would post it in case anyone else will find it useful. This script is similar to the Push2Tape script that comes as a sample with the Compellent Powershell Command Set.  The difference is that the Push2Tape script doesn’t take a new replay.  It grabs the most recently taken replay.  The idea is that you control when the replay gets taken using the replay scheduling facility on the Compellent.  This is preferable in most cases, because […]