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StuartA58

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StuartA58

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September 12th, 2012 08:00

Hurricane Disk Drive Replacement ?

Our EMC CEs installed an FCO on our DMX and VMAX (2 x seperate FCOs) and conducted a "Hurricane Disk Drive Scan" of our Arrays.

We have to replace 62 disk drives in our DMX and 175 disk drives in our VMAX! 

Apparently the Hurricane Drives have a problem and "may" fail.  The scan identifies Hurricane Drives with a potential problem.

Has anyone heard of this?  Has anyone done this?  Do you know any more than me?

1.  What is the problem?

2.  Is there any impact on the Arrays when they do this?

3.  They are doing currently replacing 4 disks/day on the DMX, with no side-effects that we can tell.

4.  They want to bring in a "Clone Appliance" and connect it to the VMAX, and they say they can then replace 8 drives/day on the VMAX, but there may be a performance impact, and they may have to cut back on the number of drives replaced per day to less than 8, like 5 or 4.

I'm interested in your experience stories.

    Stuart

  • dynamox

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    Posted September 18th, 2012 07:00

    Stuart,

    would you happen to have the FCO # ?

    Thanks

  • olly_t

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    Posted September 18th, 2012 07:00

    it's a widespread problem over all storage vendors.  we're working out the best way to replace affected drives in our EMC state and are still investigating.  Be aware when using the clone appliance you'll be running without RAID protection during the cloning time - we've discounted this approach as a result.

  • RobertDudley

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    Posted September 18th, 2012 08:00

    ETA EMC254763

    That is referenced in the information I have on it.

  • StuartA58

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    Posted September 18th, 2012 11:00

    Olly_T:

    What does this mean "without parity protection"?  That can't be true....

        Stuart

  • olly_t

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    Posted September 19th, 2012 01:00

    Hi StuartA58 - this if only from the info I've been given.  The drive is spun down, and removed (not spared out) for cloning.  At this point, the set will be degraded.  After cloning, any missing tracks are built from parity when the disk is back online.

  • olly_t

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    Posted September 19th, 2012 06:00

    Cheers Stuart - That's the approach we might have to go down, but we've got well over 1,000 to swap in our environment, and knowing the time it takes to spare a disk, I might have retired by then!!!

    If anyone has any bright ideas on how to do it quicker, without risk - I'd be really interested to know!!

  • StuartA58

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    Posted September 19th, 2012 06:00

    Olly:

    This is VERY interesting!  We weren't told this.

    We ARE doing a "manual" replacement of Hurricane Drives in a DMX (3 per day for 20 days - seems like forever) right now. On the DMX, with manual drive replacement, the data is copied to the Hot Spare and then the disk is replaced, so no "mirrors" are lost.

    I'm following up with our local EMC Team.  thanks for you comment!

        Stuart

  • RobertDudley

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    Posted September 24th, 2012 12:00

    Tell EMC to get you a new array and migrate to it using PPME.