Concurrent maintenance on EMC CLARiiON systems

Concurrent maintenance is the ability to process I/O operations to a controller while simultaneously doing maintenance on it.

Important: An EMC field engineer must complete all maintenance procedures.

The EMC CLARiiON FC series and the IBM Spectrum Virtualize™ clustered system allow concurrent replacement of the following components:

Disk drives
Controller fans (fans must be replaced within 2 minutes or controllers are shut down)
Disk enclosure fans (fans must be replaced within 2 minutes or controllers are shut down)
Controller (service processor: you must first disable cache)
Fibre Channel Bypass cards (LCC)
Power supplies (you must first remove fans)
Uninterruptible power supply battery (SPS)

EMC CLARiiON FC devices require that the I/O is quiesced during code update. Consequently, the IBM Spectrum Virtualize system does not support concurrent update of the FC controller code.

The EMC CLARiiON CX series and the IBM Spectrum Virtualize system allow concurrent replacement of the following components:

Disk drives
Controller (service processor or drawer controller)
Power/cooling modules (modules must be replaced within 2 minutes or controllers are shut down)
Uninterruptible power supply battery (SPS)

The IBM Spectrum Virtualize system and EMC CLARiiON CX devices support concurrent code update of the CX controllers.

Note:

EMC CLARiiON procedures for concurrent update must be followed in all cases.
The CX Series also has a feature called Data In Place Update which allows you to update from one model to another (for example, from the CX200 to the CX600) with no data loss or migration required. This is not a concurrent operation.