Product Information Bulletin

REO Appliance Software Version 5.0.3.17 Release Announcement

August 2009

REO Software Version 5.0.3.17 Release Announcement

PREFACE

This Product Information Bulletin announces the release of software version 5.0.3.17 for the REO appliance, effective March 25, 2009. The previous general availability software release was Version 5.0.3.10 (REO 1500, 1550, 4500, 4500c, 9100 and 9100c).

MODELS AFFECTED

REO 1500, 1550, 4500, 4500c, 9100 and 9100c appliances are affected.

VERSION 5.0.3.17 CHANGES AND ENHANCEMENTS

• This version of REO ProtectionOS addresses certain Internet Explorer 8 display issues.

• iSCSI initiators could not be added to a REO VTL using Internet Explorer 8. This has been fixed.

• Certain VTL parameters were not being updated correctly using Internet Explorer 8. This has been fixed.

• Some network configurations were not being validated correctly. This has been corrected.

• Email alert messages sent from the REO to mail programs other than Exchange sometimes were delivered with nothing in the body of the message. This has been corrected.

VERSION 5.0.3.17 RESTRICTIONS

• You cannot upgrade a REO 9100 with 3.1.0 software (or earlier) to 5.0.3.17. If you attempt to load the 5.0.3.17 upgrade file in the Update System page the following error message will be displayed:

REO Software Version 5.0.3.17 Release Announcement

Note: The above graphic shows version 5.0.1.45. The results will be the same with version 5.0.3.17

If you would like to upgrade your REO 3.1.x appliance to 5.0.3.17 please contact Overland Technical Support.

• If you use the Support Request File feature on a Windows Server 2003 or Windows XP platform, Windows may change the file extension from .tgz to .tar. This prevents programs such as PowerArchiver and WinZip from opening and displaying the compressed files. Manually change the extension to use the original .tgz extension.

• REO iSCSI connectivity using the native Solaris iSCSI software initiator is currently not supported.

MULTI-SITEPAC ONLY • Make sure that the schedule for a backup job on the remote host does not overlap with the schedule for the corresponding Mirror job. A mirror job should start after the backup job completes.

VERSION 5.0.3.17 KNOWN ISSUES

There are a few things you should be aware of before you begin using Protection OS version 5.0.3.

• Backups may fail trying to span tapes when using a QLogic iSCSI SNIC with Symantec NetBackup.

• iSCSI connections to the REO from Red Hat Linux version 5 may fail with an iSCSI noop seq error. This is a known issue with this version of Red Hat Linux, and has been fixed in version 5.1. You can work around the problem by turning the nop as a ping off by setting

node.conn[0].timeo.noop_out_interval = 0 node.conn[0].timeo.noop_out_timeout = 0

REO Software Version 5.0.3.17 Release Announcement

in the /etc/iscsi/iscsi.conf file, and then rediscovering the iSCSI devices (rerun iscsiadm -m discovery –p ip:port)

• Changing topology from Auto to Loop (NL_Port) may fail and cause the host lose its targets. Change the topology back to Auto to regain access to the targets.

• You can add up to two REO Expansion Arrays at a time to the REO 9100 or REO 9100c appliance. However, you will only receive a single alert via the SNMP and/or SMTP alert system.

• If you are adding a REO expansion array and 12 drives to your REO 9100 at the same time, clicking the Add Storage button will not bring all of the storage into the REO 9100 configuration at once. You will need to click the Add Storage button twice to bring the two different types of storage into the REO configuration.

• If a REO Expansion Array is removed from the REO while it is operating, or it suffers a complete power failure and becomes unresponsive, the REO might hang during the RAID set health detection phase rather than immediately displaying a REO Recovery Page. Reboot the REO appliance, the Recovery page should appear as expected.

• Using REO disk targets with the native Solaris 10 iSCSI software initiator can result in disk I/O errors and poor performance in general.

OTHER INFORMATION

REO Appliance software version 5.0.3.17 is available for download from the Overland Storage ftp site: ftp://ftp.overlandstorage.com/Software/REO/5.0.3

Additional documentation on how to operate, configure, and support your REO Appliance is available on the Overland Storage Customer Support Portal: http://www.overlandstorage.com/support