question about ESRS

Yes, loss of communication with EMC corp and the ESRS server creates a SEV1 ticket.

admingirl  the connectivity between the Gateway and EMC is tested every 30 seconds via ping.

If the device is shown as offline the email is then generated.

Great thank you Caribe, so if our email service is down due to a data center issue, will I get a call?

Thank you both for your response.

So Ryan, this would mean if we lost the data center quickly(fire, explosion,etc) and there was no time to email outside of the data center, EMC would generate these emails and is so, is it based on a timing that I setup? For instance, the link between the two is tested only once every 24 hours or is it real time?

Thanks so much!

Admingirl

In that case you also will not receive your user alerts from storage arrays or switches that rely on email alerting.  So hopefully you able to build in redundancy in your email environment to harden that.  Otherwise if that happens, having ESRS offline is probably the least of your worries :-).

Starting in Q1, EMC will implement a process to create service requests for ESRS gateways that show as offline for an extended period of time, such as 7 days.  This will help keep track of ESRS gateways that have gone missing without resolution.  When the email alerts are sent out, it will also copy in the primary and secondary CEs to the account for visibility.  The advantage with the new program has been to automate the process and provide quicker and repeatable notification to customers when the ESRS server does go missing.  The prior system of creating SRs and dispatching to the field had been creating some delays in resolution as the field CEs are not always online, and servers that were bouncing were not readily identified as such.

Good discussion and answers. You right if the site takes a big hit the least of the worries is a notification to EMC.  I would suppose from my DR planning that Operations would be directed to call, page or send UBER drivers to all stake holders.

Ryan, I wonder if having a GW at the PROD site and the DR site and cluster the devices would accomplish the hardening you suggested

Rusty

Hi RustyMartin . I believe the redundancy for hardening that ryanbrancel  is referring to is SMTP server redundancy on the customer side. However, having an ESRS Gateway server at another physical location/site, clustered with the existing ESRS server, would allow EMC to dial-in from the peer site in the event of a site disaster (note that we don't get to select which GW to dial-in from, the connection is automatically established based off availability/connectivity status and load balancing) if the required customer network connectivity, including firewall/port requirements, is in place. Additionally, for some EMC products, call home can be configured using one ESRS GW as the primary method and the peer ESRS GW server as the failover method. Some products even support additional failover methods in which customer SMTP servers could be utilized as well. That being said, there are multiple ways to add redundancy to an environment, but having a clustered ERS gateway configuration is definitely beneficial for connect-in and connect-home. Therefore, it is recommended.

Adding admingirl  for visibility.