Release Notes

Distributed Sparing
Distributed sparing allocates spare disk space across all drives rather than reserving an entire drive as a spare. Distributed sparing enables
the storage system to use all disks in a balanced and optimized manner, which ensures the fastest recovery time following a drive failure.
After a storage system is updated to Storage Center 7.3, it automatically manages all spare drives and prompts the user to enable the Spare
Optimizer feature. The option to enable the Spare Optimizer feature is displayed in the Storage Manager Client and Unisphere interface.
This process moves RAID data to distribute the spare space among the drives. If Spare Optimizer is not enabled, all drives might appear to
be managed, but sparing space is focused on a limited number of drives.
No dedicated spare drives are present in a storage system after updating to Storage Center 7.3.
Existing storage systems inherit the sparing ratio after updating a Storage Center. New installations of Storage Center default to a 20:1
sparing ratio.
Health Check for Software Updates
Before installing a software update, Storage Center checks the system to make sure it can update properly. If any health checks fail,
Storage Manager reports information about the errors found.
Initial Setup and Conguration
Improvements have been made to the Storage Center initial setup and conguration workow, including the option to use DHCP for
assigning IP addresses.
NOTE
: The option to use DHCP for assigning IP addresses is not available for SCv2000 series storage systems.
iSCSI HBA Support
This release supports 25 GbE and 100 GbE iSCSI HBAs for SC5020, SC7020, and SC9000 storage systems.
This release also supports 25 GbE and 100 GbE iSCSI mezzanine cards for SC5020 and SC7020 storage systems.
NOTE
: The 25 GbE and 100 GbE iSCSI HBAs/mezzanine cards do not support Data Center Bridging (DCB) in Storage Center
7.3.1. The iSCSI HBAs/mezzanine cards fail to pause trac after receiving PFC pause frames.
Live Volume ALUA
This release includes full support for Live Volume ALUA, including identication of optimzed and non-optimized paths. A guided process is
provided to enable this feature after the software update is completed.
Proactive Notications
Dell EMC technical support can send notications to your system based on alerts that are reported by Storage Center. These notications
may include a recommended Storage Center software update, a technical x, a best practice, a specic issue, or other alerts.
Acknowledging a notication sends a message to technical support informing them that you have received the notication. Proactive
notications are displayed in the alerts section of Storage Manager and Unisphere. If the system is set up to send alerts using SNMP,
customers also receive alerts through email.
Storage Manager 2018 R1 Release Notes
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