Clariion Interview Questions & Answers

Explain Clariion architecture

The CLARiiON storage system is based on a modular architecture. The first building block of the architecture is the Disk Processor Enclosure, or DPE. The DPE houses the storage Processor(s) and the first Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FC-AL) disks. Disk Array Enclosures (DAEs) are interconnected using Link Control Cards (LCCs).The module architecture allows the customer to add drives as needed to meet capacity requirements. When more capacity is required, additional disk array enclosures (DAE or DAE2) containing disk modules can be easily added. LCC or Link Control Cards are used to connect shelves of disks. In addition, the LCC monitors the FRUs within the shelf and reports status information to the storage processor. The LCC contains bypass circuitry that allows continued operation of the loop in the event of port failure. Newer CLARiiON arrays have two processors per Storage Processor, and do not use a DPE. Instead, it utilizes an SPE or Storage Processor Enclosure. The SPE does not contain any disk modules, so it must have at least one DAE2 and a maximum of 16 DAE2s. CLARiiON Architecture is based on intelligent Storage Processors that manage physical drives on the back end and service host requests on the front end, be it Fibre Channel or iSCSI protocols. Storage Processors communicate to each other over the CLARiiON Messaging Interface (CMI). Both the front-end connection to the host and the back-end connection to the physical storage is 2Gb Fibre channel.

What are different types of clarion models?

Hardware Models of Clariion

CX-200,300,300i,400,500,500i,600 and 700 CX3-10, 20, 40 and CX3-80 CX4-120, 240, 480 and CX4-960 AX Series FC Series

What are the differences between Clariion CX-3 series and CX-4 Series What are the Hardware components of Clariion What are the management tools for Clariion
NaviCli NaviSphere Manager EMC Control Center SymCli

How to Initialize Clariion Array What is Access Logix and How do you enable it?
Access Logix provides LUN masking that allows sharing of storage system.

Why Access Logix has to be enabled

If Access Logix is not enabled all LUNs are presented to all storage system ports. Any host that connects to the storage system will then have access to all of the LUNs on that storage system. In environments where multiple hosts attach to the storage system, this will cause problems. Windows systems may attempt to take ownership of LUNs belonging to other Windows systems, and Unix systems may try to mount Windows LUNs, Access Logix solves these problems by performing LUN masking it masks certain LUNs from hosts that are not authorized to see them, and presents those LUNs only to the server(s) which are authorized to see them. In effect, it present a virtual storage system to each host the host sees the equivalent of a storage system dedicated to it alone, with only its own LUNs visible to it. Another task which Access Logix performs is the mapping of CLARiiON LUNs, often called FLARE LUNs or FLUs, to host LUNs. It will determine which physical addresses, in this case the device numbers, each attached host will use for its LUNs. Note that this

feature is configurable by the user through the CLI and the GUI. Access to LUNs is controlled by information stored in the Access Logix database, which is resident in a reserved area of CLARiiON disk - the PSM LUN. The Access Logix software manages this database.When host agents in the CLARiiON environment start up, typically shortly after host boot time, they send initiator information to all storage systems they are connected to. This initiator information is stored in the Access Logix database.

What are Vault drives and how much capacity they use? What is CMI? Clariion Message Interface
Storage Processors communicate to each other over the CLARiiON Messaging Interface (CMI).

What are the I/O Operations in Clariion Use of SPs What is Storage array in Clariion? Create Storage group How to manually restore failed paths in Clariion How do you gather SP Collects? How do you upgrade the NaviSphere Manager? What are steps to assign a LUN to existing Host? Explain step by step procedure for storage provision to the new host? How do create capacity planning reports in Clariion? What is HEAT report? How do you enter into the Engineering Mode and what are the activities we can perform in Engineering Mode? How do you create a meta LUN? Explain step by step procedure for LUN migration? What is Private LUN Pool? What is Reserved LUN Pool? How do you deregister the hosts from NaviSphere? How do you create a user and assign access rights? How do you monitor Clariion alerts? What is the recommended ration of Read and Write cache?