The EqualLogic strikes back
After a month or so of peace, the truce between EqualLogic and I has been broken.
Yes the errant drive 20 has once again gone bonkers dropping in out and finally failing.
If you missed the last times marathin fix go here to see it. Basically our EQ was well broken with 6 failed disks and was only saved by the propeller heads in EQ Engineering over in the US after about 9 hours and 15 hours after I arrived at work.
EQ phoned home and I waited for the call. This came 12 hours later which is not bad considering we have 24/7 cover with a 4 hour fix. I believe the 4 hour fix actually refers to the time it takes to get the part to you after they have decided what is wrong with the unit, which can take as long as it takes, maybe I should read the small print sometime.
Once again the diagnostics were emailed off to Ireland, a new support guy this time, I am working my way through them and rate of knots. The diagnosis is that the SATA card needs to be replaced, this was the one that got replaced last time then swapped back when everything went haywire and 6 disks failed. In theory this is a hot swap but after our experience last time I don't want to take the risk of testing Windows and VMware's resilience to hard drives disappearing. I will turn of as many of the systems as I possibly can before we risk all.
I did ask if we could have someone who knew what they were doing rather than rely on someone on the end of a phone talking a contractor through what to do, the blind leading the blind seems and apt description, however, apparently these failures are so rare that it is unlikely that any available engineer would have experience. Well sorry, but don't the engineers go on training courses where they do this sort of thing to gain experience? Obviously not.
I am really starting to have a worrying feeling about choosing Dell. US experience may differ, but in the UK Dell support seems to be more like a three ring circus, with the clowns filling in for the acrobats, than anything really solid and reliable that you can pin your business on.
To avoid the problems with a late arrival of an engineer impacting on normal service as we had last time (2 hours later than we asked) I have scheduled one for an evening visit. As the unit holds development systems there are no backups to worry about, not that I want to rebuild 30 servers and we have just started the patching of the SAP servers starting with DEV, so not losing all that work would be good and avoid a lot of grief. What I might do is get the boss to test VMware backups with Backup Exec on our new LTO 5 library now we have some agent licenses, neither of which we are using at the moment as things have been too busy to focus on them. The latest version of BE can backup virtual machines directly to tape so this would be a good test and a handy roll back should the worst happen.
Yes the errant drive 20 has once again gone bonkers dropping in out and finally failing.
If you missed the last times marathin fix go here to see it. Basically our EQ was well broken with 6 failed disks and was only saved by the propeller heads in EQ Engineering over in the US after about 9 hours and 15 hours after I arrived at work.
EQ phoned home and I waited for the call. This came 12 hours later which is not bad considering we have 24/7 cover with a 4 hour fix. I believe the 4 hour fix actually refers to the time it takes to get the part to you after they have decided what is wrong with the unit, which can take as long as it takes, maybe I should read the small print sometime.
Once again the diagnostics were emailed off to Ireland, a new support guy this time, I am working my way through them and rate of knots. The diagnosis is that the SATA card needs to be replaced, this was the one that got replaced last time then swapped back when everything went haywire and 6 disks failed. In theory this is a hot swap but after our experience last time I don't want to take the risk of testing Windows and VMware's resilience to hard drives disappearing. I will turn of as many of the systems as I possibly can before we risk all.
I did ask if we could have someone who knew what they were doing rather than rely on someone on the end of a phone talking a contractor through what to do, the blind leading the blind seems and apt description, however, apparently these failures are so rare that it is unlikely that any available engineer would have experience. Well sorry, but don't the engineers go on training courses where they do this sort of thing to gain experience? Obviously not.
I am really starting to have a worrying feeling about choosing Dell. US experience may differ, but in the UK Dell support seems to be more like a three ring circus, with the clowns filling in for the acrobats, than anything really solid and reliable that you can pin your business on.
To avoid the problems with a late arrival of an engineer impacting on normal service as we had last time (2 hours later than we asked) I have scheduled one for an evening visit. As the unit holds development systems there are no backups to worry about, not that I want to rebuild 30 servers and we have just started the patching of the SAP servers starting with DEV, so not losing all that work would be good and avoid a lot of grief. What I might do is get the boss to test VMware backups with Backup Exec on our new LTO 5 library now we have some agent licenses, neither of which we are using at the moment as things have been too busy to focus on them. The latest version of BE can backup virtual machines directly to tape so this would be a good test and a handy roll back should the worst happen.
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