With all the excitement lately around the release of FLARE 30, Unisphere and FAST, the fact that there was also a major code release for Celerra has been somewhat overshadowed. Sure, fully automated storage tiering is pretty sexy, but there is some strong substance with DART 6. Listed below is a brief rundown of the high points with this new release:
– Support for the new Unisphere management console
– Support for pNFS (Parallel Network File System) pNFS is an optional extension of NFS 4.1 which allows for all of the traditional benefits around file sharing through NFS, but allows for significantly faster file transfers via a high speed block protocol. This is in concept similar to EMC’s MPFS (Multi-Path File System) but uses an open source client instead of the EMC MPFS client
– The number of NDMP streams has been increased from 4 to 8 for the NS-G8 and NS-960. Open source NDMP client software is also now supported for HP-UX, Oracle Solaris, RHEL, and SUSE Enterprise to enable simple data copy, relocation and migration
– A single NS-960 and NSG8 X-Blade will scale up to 256TB FC and/or ATA IP of storage capacity, with full support of replication, iSCSI and MPFS. (The single file system size limit of 16TB has not been increased)
– The DART OS has now been migrated to the AMD 64/Intel EM64T instruction set which allows DART to address more than 4GB of memory. While may seem somewhat insignificant now, it lays the foundation for future improvements in capacity, performance, and innovation in general
– IPv6 support for CAVA, CIFS, Usermapper, iSCSI, Kerberos, Replicator 2, NFS 4, NTP, and XLT
– The following securing and auditing related features have been added:
- User-selectable auditing: Once enabled by an Administrator, auditing will start automatically upon control station reboot for both the primary and standby control station
- Independent auditing by primary and standby control stations: When two control stations are present, they will be able to audit simultaneously and with independent configurations
- Administrative roles for CLI: Extends the existing GUI-based administrative roles. Customers can now limit specific Celerra functionality in both GUI and CLI to roles such as Backup Administrator, Security Administrator, etc., as well as custom roles
- CEPA (Celerra Event Publishing Agent): Now adds NFS auditing applications to the existing support for enterprise quota management and anti-virus applications. This initial support works with the Veronis DatAdvantage software
– A Warm Boot feature has been added which speeds up the data mover reboot time by around 2 minutes through eliminating fixed-time aspects of the reboot process such as hardware reset, BIOS, as well as POST
– DART 6 supports SMI-S clients through the addition of an SMI-S provider to enable the management of Celerra via CIM operations for NAS
– DART code upgrades can now be carried out by the customer through the Unisphere interface requiring no assistance from EMC or an EMC certified partner
Matt Hensley's Blog 
Am I the only one terrified by the thought of performing my own DART upgrades?
Hi Caleb,
Thanks for your interest in my blog. I would tend to agree with you…depending on your individual environment it may be best to leave a DART upgrade to EMC, after all it’s included in your support. I think the main point here, however, is that EMC is working to simplify the management of their technologies for the customer, and empower them to have more control and flexibility with their storage infrastructure.
Thanks
Oh yeah, I get it, and I like that idea very much. I haven’t tried it yet, only having Unisphere running on a production Clariion and Celerra, but I wonder, how many, “Are you really sure you want to do this” type messages does the engineer get first?