On Demand Data Progression

Realize 6.4 to 6.5 is a big upgrade IMO. Our issue was we had extremely aggressive replay schedules setup on all of our production volumes. 90% of our volumes had a replay taken every 15 minutes which expired after 2 days, 1 day replays that expired after 7 days and one week replays that expired every 4 weeks. It worked for us since the install (yes i know that's a massive amount of replays) but after upgrading to 6.5 performance fell on it's face. The issue as i understand it (Dell can comment if i'm incorrect) is our replay schedule was too aggressive for on demand data progression to keep up. Since we were taking replays all of the time the system could not combine the previous replays every 15 minutes - it was too much. We pulled back our replays to only 1 hour on all 95% of the volumes and kept things like SQL at 15 minute replays and our system runs fine now. Just something to be aware of. The key feature for 6.5 was the on demand data progression, it's definitely a game changer and allows you to actively tier data up / down on demand (by means of a replay) rather than waiting every 24 hours.

Call CoPilot to get the details and make sure you are ready for the upgrade and that some random guy on the forum board isn't feeding you ***. I believe we also had to upgrade Enterprise Manager to their 2014 R2 version (that's what they call it now instead of the release numbers). That piece was simple, just run the msi and install the application.

Side note: I've requested this before but it would be super neato if Dell Compellent could *** Replays from on demand data progression. On demand data progression is awesome don't get me wrong, but having data progression married to replay's ***. The reason is as a consumer you use Replay's for RPO/RTO purposes. I take a replay every 15 minutes because i want my data protected in case of a corruption or data loss at the OS level. I want data progression for the purpose of performance and making the best use of the Tier's in my SAN. These are two very important features that Compellent provides but they should not be married because they are separate. I may have a volume that is extremely important from an RPO/RTO standpoint but I could care less where the data lives - in this case I don't want Replay's to kick off data progression especially if doing so on a large scale can cause issues. Alternatively I may have a volume that I don't want to live on Tier1 but i want it on Tier3 - in this case i could care less about my RPO/RTO and maybe once a week is fine - in this case i want to kick of progression without having to rely on a replay. I do realize a replay is required for data progression to even move the data up / down but having the two married really hurts your customers that have very high RPO/RTO's but cannot keep 15 minute replays because of the progression piece. Okay off my soap box.

Second side note: You can have on demand data progression disabled on volumes in the 6.5 code - althought there is no way for you the user to do it, only Copilot can do it AND it's on by default, so you have to call every time you want a new volume to not do on demand data progression.