EqualLogic woes

What is it with new kit that makes it not work properly? I often find once you make it through the first month you don’t tend to get any failures for years.

Our most recent EqualLogic is a case in point. This is a P65000 or Sumo unit with a whole bunch of SATA drive in it. First off it was ok but a drive went after a week, then another drive went, then the same drive went again, prefaced by a large number of controller can’t talk to drive, yes it can, no it can’t, yes it can logs. Then the replacement went the same way.

Now to my mind this indicates that something fundamental is wrong. First thing I was asked to do by the dell man was to failover the controllers, now there is no obvious way of doing this, no big button that you can click on, so a quick Google and it seems that the way to do this is to restart the unit.

Now if you are like me Restart means shutdown then start up again, but in the EQ world it means that you shut down the controller, failover to the other controller then start up the controller, I am not entirely sure whether it restarts the offline controller first but it did the trick, there is no noticable down time on the volumes assuming you have the recommended 2 minute time set on an servers, which should be set by VMware and Windows 2008 is that by default, 2003 may need to configured separately if you any iSCSI disk attached directly to the server.
Second thing I was asked to do was update the firmware to 5.0.2 as version 4.3.5 that I am on has issues. Not as many as the 5.0.0 and 5.0.1 version that were pulled but there you go.

Then having done that if there was still problems I was to shut down the whole unit then remove the controllers and swap them over and remove and refit the SATA cards. Now we have 40 odd servers sitting on this unit so shutting it down not is really a simple option. We are going to have to talk to a lot of departments before that happens.

I have never had any issues with any HP kit be it PCs, EVA, MSA or ProLiant servers out of the box but have had several with both Dell PCs and now storage systems were parts need to be refitted after delivery.

Moral of the story is have a one month burn in for new kit and remove and reseat everything you can after you have taken it out of the box and before you turn it on.