Out of support drive failure

EMC drives in CLARiiON and VNX cannot be replaced with off-the-shelf hard disks.  EMC uses proprietary formatting of the drives, including formatting special areas and using 520-byte sectors. It would be much easier to find an EMC Service Partner and order a drive from them.

Let us know if that helps!

Karl

Is there an online directory of EMC Service partners?

I asked my EMC sales rep and she said that they do not make that drive anymore.  They have a limited number of drives available but those are only available under a maintenance contract.  She would be willing to have a new drive shipped if we commited and signed for an update, to hold us over until that upgrade took place.  (Any product, be it Data Domain, VNX series, etc..).

We did upgraded to VNX5200 and that is primary storage.  Though the NX4 / AX4-5f system works fine and has storage space, we didn't just "throw it away".  We just use it as staging area for test VM's or new projects.  Then when the project goes live we would storage vMotion the VM to production (VNX5200).

I don't care if we even have to ebay a drive, but worst case if we wanted to unload this thing and get some rack space back, are there also partners that would buy it from us?  Hate to throw it away when it cost us a ton of money back in 2009.  I think its off the books now but still its the principal of it.  I'd hate to throw it on eBay too, what a logistical nightmare to get all the components shipped to the winner.

Hello,

Sorry this will not work. EMC Arrays are internally formatting the drives differently.

Regards

If I could say how I felt about this, the thread would not be G- rated and the mods would quickly have to step in.  What I don't understand is that you have so many different filesystem formats out there, and the host operating system takes care of the formatting so it works with the system.  You can buy a drive and put it in a Mac, Windows PC, Linux PC, and each individual operating system takes care of the format, and in many cases you have a choice (like ext3, reiserfs, zfs, fat32, ntfs, hfs, etc....)  So why doesn't FLARE see the drive and do its low level format and then format the drive the way it needs?  Oh I think it certainly could do that, just nobody programmed it that way (you can teach a machine to do anything with proper code).  Its just a way to get more money into EMC's pockets.  I'll remember that for next time were due up for any type of storage gear.  Who knows maybe Dell will open things up a bit since they have a big investment in hardware.  Dell hardware is pretty open, i've used various drives in their servers (fujitsu, seagate, western digital, hgst).

Meanwhile I have our account rep at PCM looking to see if THEY can source anything like this.

To be frank, any storage provider - NetApp, SUN/Oracle, HP, IBM do very much the same.  If this were an IBM DS4800 or XIV, you would not be able to just add an off-the-shelf disk.  NetApp, EMC and most other hardware vendors modify their base hardware (disks) in some way to add functionality.  This isn't about closing things off and making them proprietary, it's about adding additional levels of protection, i.e. using a 520-byte sector to include an 8-byte checksum.

Also, there's a significant difference between a filesystem - which resides above the disk layer and the physical disk layer. EMC and most vendors choose to make changes at the disk layer to get extra protection.  Sure, it would be great if FLARE could reconfigure a physical drive to add this, but EMC chose not to.  If EMC, IBM, NetApp and all the other vendors seem to be incapable of doing this, it might be for a good reason. 

Finally, a quick Google search can point out EMC Service Partners in your country or service area.  Some vendors have standard web fronts that will sell hardware on a credit card number, while others will want some form of service contract to support your array.

Please mark your question "Answered" as you found a solution that may help others.

glen