[tech] More unhappy storage
Andrew Adamson
bob at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Mon Aug 5 23:22:07 WST 2013
Evening,
Another storage device we have behind the scenes that you probably never
hear about is a NetApp FAS-2020 NAS. It does storage of /services as well
as motsugo's /vmstore. We got donated this directly from NetApp a couple
of years ago and we love them lots. It has dual controllers called onetel
and nortel, and they can be controlled via their web interface [1] or over
ssh. I'm telling you this because I looked at the UCC wiki only to
discover we have zero documentation on them.
Anyway, in the latest electrical assault on UCC that also broke the SAN,
another disk in the NAS had an amber light flashing. We've had a flashing
light one disk since day zero that we haven't really worried about, but
generally amber lights are a bad thing so I investigated further. The
status on both the webpage and from `sysconfig' on the command line
indicated that everything was fine - no failed disks and all the
'aggregates' (collections of disks in RAID 4) were fine. A disk report on
the web interface didn't show any failed disks. However, a disk count of
registered disks on the system came up two short.
Further investigation with `sysconfig -d', which gives disk details,
revealed that nortel wasn't registering that the disks were there, which
leads me to believe the FAS-2020 doesn't tell you about disk failures
after a reboot. Just something to watch out for!
All this is not particularly concerning as nortel was set up with several
hot spares for just this scenario. We still have double parity and a hot
spare, however from what I can tell we need another spare disk if we want
the controller failover to work (onetel can take over from nortel if
nortel dies). We got some 300G SAS disks with the latest gear from Apache
Energy, and according to [2] we should be able to flash firmware on them
that will allow us to use them as NetApp disks. Failing that we might be
able to approach NetApp for some assistance.
If anybody is keen to learn more about the NetApp, this is a really good
piece of enterprise kit to know about, and I would be happy to give a
quick crash course and hand over the disk replacement task to somebody
with more time. I found [3] to be a particularly helpful resource for
getting up to speed quickly.
Andrew Adamson
bob at ucc.asn.au
|"If you can't beat them, join them, and then beat them." |
| ---Peter's Laws |
[1] from within the ucc network: http://nortel.ucc.asn.au/na_admin
[2] http://www.liveinternet.ru/users/vardomskiy/post127616861/
[3]https://communities.netapp.com/servlet/JiveServlet/previewBody/2999-102-1-3620/NetApp-Basic-Concepts-Quickstart-Guide.pdf
More information about the tech
mailing list