HP D2700 - remote shutdown when power failure occurs?

Had an issue today - power went down, didn't come back on so the servers shut themselves down. Problem is, the array on my D2700 was in the middle of a transformation after I added another pair of discs. Follow on problem was the D2700 didn't shut down until the batteries were exhausted.

Now power is back up, let the UPS charge for a while, then fired things up - and found the array had thrown 2 disks (fortunately both from the same side of the array so it was just degraded not totally failed). Removed and re-inserted and the controller is happily rebuilding the two disks.

But how can I avoid this remote but actual event - graceful shut down of the server obviously wasn't enough - how do I do a graceful shut down of the disk shelf?

The D2700 is just a disk shelf. It spins everything up as soon as power is attached.

Whatever caused those two disks to be dumped out of the array was because of the server, not the enclosure.

Distinctly possible - I do remain to be fully convinced though.

But is there a way of gracefully shutting the thing down? Even if it didn't cause the disks to be rejected, it was a waste of battery.

If it's just the shelf then no, the server shutting down has already done everything it needs to.

The act of the disks spinning down probably caused your issues.

You won't find many SANs that shut down when UPSes drop to battery because the servers will shut down so that everything is committed to disk, and the SAN itself will keep anything not written to disk in a battery backed cache ready for the power to come back on. The result of shutting an array down before the servers that are relying on it have finished using it are far worse than the array having to flush some cache contents to disk on a restart.

Oh it would definitely have to shut down after the server that hangs off it.

So my only option is to use a UPS with seperately switchable outlet groups? Shut the server down, then shut the group off that the shelf is on. I think one of my UPSs can do that, but predictably, not the one the shelf is on...

No, just let the power die when the UPS battery gives up. Your servers should have cleanly shutdown long before that anyway, if they haven't then your UPS batteries aren't big enough.

Still seems strange to me that they can't be shut down but ok thanks

What would you see a shutdown involving since it's just a shelf full of disks and any cache flush will happen on the controller which is inside the server that does get a graceful shutdown?

What you're looking for is an equivalent of a shutdown sequence on an external USB hard drive after you've ejected it from the OS.