Heads up !! – EMC VNX1 Users – Potential Outage

My ever reliable EMC TAM emailed me recently to give me a heads up regarding a potential issue with one of our VNX arrays. This particular array was overdue for an upgrade anyway, but has special change control requirements.

It affects VNX1 series arrays that have particular 300GB & 600GB 15K SAS drives with the following part numbers 005049271, 005049272, 005049273 and 005049274 (obviously very common components). Arrays with a slightly older Block code base 05.32.000.5.207 or .209

The service advisory is here   [support.emc.com login required]

Essentially, a defect exists in the ProActive Copy function [PACO] which serves to preempt a drive failure and begin a copy to hotspare before an actual drive failure occurs. It seems that under some circumstances, this may trigger cascading proactive ops leading to potential data unavailability and data-loss.  Potentially.

Are you affected ? This can be checked easily in 2 ways;

From Unisphere,

Check your OE version from the System Info screen; and then from the hardware screen, filter disks by TLA part number;

6-10-2014 10-27-27 PM

6-10-2014 10-28-36 PM

 

 

 

 

..and of course from naviseccli, using the following one liners from a Powershell shell; (change the h:\ drive reference to the location of your choice)

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Output if the TLA numbers a re present is ;

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The “-quiet” parameter is a Boolean response, as if you’re like me you have many results, and we want to be concise 🙂

A new ProActive copy algorithm has been developed and included in OE version 05.32.000.215 which resolves the issue with a new algorithm PICO-R (resilient).

So check it out, assess the risk and move forward with your Change Control requirements.

 

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3 thoughts on “Heads up !! – EMC VNX1 Users – Potential Outage

  1. EMC posted procedure on how to check on VNX with regards to Article ETA Number:195555 Version:7. Please publish or email me at lmanning@ups.com procedure for VMAX? Thank you very much.

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