New RecoverPoint Hardware Platform 

Introducing the latest generation of RecoverPoint Appliance the ‘EMC Europa 1U’ Gen6 which replaces the ‘Intel R1000’ Gen5 Appliance. The Gen6 RPA is available from RP code levels 4.1.3 and 4.4SP1+. Gen4 (Dell PowerEdge R610), Gen5 and Gen6 appliances are supported at these code levels and may be mixed in the same cluster, but the recommended best practice is to configure the latest types as RPA 1 and RPA 2 (cluster control RPAs) to improve system function and performance.

  • Gen6 and Gen5 can exist in the same RecoverPoint cluster
  • Gen6 appliances have to be the first and second RPA in the cluster. This is because those RPAs run the Cluster Control services for the cluster.
  • To complete this task, replace RPA1 and RPA2 with the Gen6 RPAs. Then add the existing Gen5 RPAs back into the cluster
  • Gen6 and Gen5 can be used in a mixed-site system where Gen6 reside in one or more sites, and Gen5 reside in one or more sites.

Support for VMAX 10K, 20K, 40K, VNX, VNXe3200, VNX-F, Unity, VPLEX, XtremIO and VMAX3 arrays via VPLEX. Support for Gen6 is also included with Vblock/VxBlock CI systems.

Gen6 Spec:

The RecoverPoint appliance (RPA) is a 1u hardware based server (‘EMC Europa 1U’ – Gen6). The specification of the Gen6 RPA is as follows (Note: The DVD drive has been removed, the options to install are from USB or External DVD):

•  2 x Haswell E5-2620 Processors
•  Two 1.2TB 2.5” SAS Drives in RAID1 configuration (Slot 0&2)
•  6 x 1GE ports (RJ-45) WAN, LAN & Remote management + 3 ports are unused
•  32 Gig DDR4 Memory (4X DIMMS)
•  2 x PSU 1100 Watts (N+1 configuration)
•  6 x Fans per Gen6 appliance
•  PCIe GEN3 slot1: Quad Port 16GB FC VortexQ Card (Labelled left-right 0-1-2-3 )
•  PCIe GEN3 slot2: Optional Quad Port 10GB Ethernet slic, 2 flavours: Rockslide (4prt 10GbaseT Copper) | Landslide (4prt SFP+ 10Gbe Optical)
Note: All supported options include the FC module. In the base configuration SLIC slot 1 is empty and customers can decide if they want to have 10GbE support or not. The possible SLICs configurations are as follows:

rpa6-4

Apart from the improved hardware spec and in addition to the features already available on the previous Gen5 appliances Gen6 offers:

  • Improved system performance.
  • Flexible configuration of I/O modules (SLICs).
  • Enhanced field and customer replacement options. (Field: HDD, PS, FAN, DIMM, Chassis, SLICs | Customer: HDD, PSU)

From the images below you can see the port usage for WAN, LAN, Serial, BMC and the HBA Port Sequence (left to right) 0-1-2-3. For each RPA, we use two Ethernet cables to connect the Management (LAN) interface to eth1 and the WAN interface to eth0.

rpa6-1

Disks:rpa6-2

System LED:

rpa6-3

Verify GEN 6 Hardware via CLI/Unisphere:

1) Login in as admin to the RP CLI
2) get_rpa_states
3) GEN VI hardware type will be EMC 500-541-044 GEN6

or Unisphere:

1) Login to RP Unisphere as admin user
2) Select RPA Clusters – RPAs
3) Check the Properties for the RPA
4) Hardware serial and Hardware platform will be listed

 

 

 

 

 

Posted on 13 By David Ring RecoverPoint Posted in RecoverPoint, Uncategorized Tagged #

David Ring

13 Comments »

  3. Hi David,

    That’s very useful information. By any chance do you have the bios password of Gen6. I was trying to re-flash it and its not booting from neither external DVDROM or bootable USB Stick.

    Cheers
    VK

  6. Hi David, do you know if the Gen6 version works with Recoverypoint Classic? Also, with these together can we do CDP with non-EMC arrays? With this use case would the splitter function occur at the switch?

    • Power down:

      Power down the RPA or RPAs, one-at-a-time:

      In order to power down the RPAs, log in to each RPA in the cluster as the boxmgmt user using a putty session, and under ‘Shutdown / Reboot operations’, choose the ‘Shutdown RPA’ option.

  8. hi David,
    I have 2 rpa gen 5 installed and will be replaced/upgraded to gen6. current status is that rpa2 is in maintenance mode. Should i go ahead and replace rpa2 with gen6 first then do the rpa1 after.

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