FLARE 30 is out in the wild!

If you didn’t already know, after a few delays, FLARE 30 is now available for download on PowerLink. I’ve been playing with Unisphere a bit, and it seems like an improvement over ole Navisphere. However, it’ll take awhile to shed those old Navi ways. At the very least its a solid base to start fresh on.

If I have any disappointment…. it would be how much DIDN’T change in Unisphere. In particular I was disappointed to see very little was done to improve analyzer. Lets hope thats something they build upon in later versions. Perhaps I was just expecting too much for a v1.0 release. Don’t get me wrong, I STRONGLY SUPPORT EMC revamping the midrange administraton tools.

One small thing is Unisphere finally shows you what failover mode a host is at in connection manager. I realize it was no big deal to find out, but its one less proceedure to do. They also put the name of the mode along with the number (IE 4 = ALUA and so on).

Also the way snapshots and clones are presented/organized is a pretty big step forward. I could go on and on, just download Unisphere and play around.

I can’t tell you how it looks with the Celerra yet since none of my Celerra’s are on DART 6. If you try to administer a DART 5.x box, it launches a browser window to the control station (how nice of it!).

I’m currently trying to figure out if a Celerra running DART 5.6.49 will work with FLARE 30 or not. I have a NS-960 basically not doing anything (who doesn’t?!), but I don’t want to brick the DART installation if I can avoid it! If/when I can get a straight answer out of EMC I’ll update this post.

I really want to put FAST Cache and all VAAI through the paces before unleashing this day 1 code onto my poor customers & users. Hopefully I’ll get a thumbs up/down by this weekend from support and I can start doing some IO testing and report back.

Of note I was told by an EMC TC that FLARE 30 = RecoverPoint upgrade, but I’ve yet to find a document to back that up. Just incase I bounced this CX/NS-960 out of the available RP splitters for now.