Dell Predicted Failures

Soldato
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Well fair play to them, We have a 6 disk Raid 5 setup in our DAS (300GB 15ks) and when I got a email from the open manage system saying disk 0:0 is a predicted failure I wasnt best happy.

Call Dell yesterday got the new disk this morning - Took drive offline and added new disk in and now its rebuilding without any management.

Though anyone know how to switch off the bloody beeping? :p

Raid.jpg


Can't fault it :)
 
Associate
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I have had the same issue the other week with one of our Dell servers and within 24 hours of contacting Dell support, we had a new hdd rebuilding happily!

The beeping should stop once the array has rebuilt itself! :)
 
Soldato
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I have had the same issue the other week with one of our Dell servers and within 24 hours of contacting Dell support, we had a new hdd rebuilding happily!

The beeping should stop once the array has rebuilt itself! :)

Yeah it does but would have like to switch it off while it was doing the rebuild.

Took 8 hours :o
 
Soldato
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Got to say HP have been good for this too. We have had some predicted failures reported in Insight Manager and have had a new disk within 24 hours.

Usually HP are good with support, although they do have their quirks sometimes :)
 
Soldato
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HDS SAN's go one better when they predict a disk about to spare out, it phones home and the first thing customers often know about it is the HDS man turning up in reception with the new disk the next morning :)
 
Man of Honour
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Got to say HP have been good for this too. We have had some predicted failures reported in Insight Manager and have had a new disk within 24 hours.

Usually HP are good with support, although they do have their quirks sometimes :)

We get our replacements within 4 hours (we pay for the priviledge though obviously).

HP support have been very good for us, we were having problems with a box and ended up deciding to swap the entire chassis, as we didn't want to reuse any hardware from it at all we needed a couple of new RAID controllers (HP 6402's - £500 each) - called HP and asked for a pair of new ones in the morning, they were there by lunchtime.

£1000 worth of controllers replaced within hours when we weren't even sure they were faulty (and we were quite up front about that). We returned the ones we pulled from the other box a couple of days later.

My only experience with Dell support recently is one of our (pretty old) dell boxes started rebooting every so often. It took nearly a week to get dell out on site, all they did in that time was asked for 6 different forms of diagnostics and tools to be run, We don't have time for that, we'll send them one set, then you they can come and fix it. That was meant to be same day response as well.

Just my experience, it may help that we spend an awful lot with HP every month but in the end, we're paying for the support and only one company is delivering it.
 
Soldato
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I got a complete replacement Sun T2000 when they couldn't tell us why it rebooted. As it was a critical Production service, their "can you turn it back on and run enhanced debugging" wasn't an acceptable response. To be fair they didn't quibble once we shook our Platinum contract in their face.
 
Soldato
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bigredshark

We have a few Dell servers and each time the SDLT drive has failed in each (leader coming off tape and getting jammed) they have asked us to upgrade the firmware, or the bios and run diagnostics etc. Not terribly practical in a production environment and when the server is located 10 miles away. :confused:
 
Soldato
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Awesome, me bieng a total noob to all things servers, I was fascinated by arrays, we have a 3 disk raid 5 for data and a 2 disk mirror for the OS.

apart from the PE 2800 missing the raid activation kit which caused me 2 days of grief, I managed to get things sorted in the end :)

I never knew you could just pull one drive and replace it with another one, without switching off the server!
 
Associate
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Most/all storage vendors do phone home now and a lot of the server vendors do. We have a few C7000 blade chassis which would phone home if they were allowed to (secure contract).
 
Soldato
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Dell kit rocks. Shame "management" here seem to think it sucks. Mind you I have switched the standard desktop build to Dell and the users are loving it.

Can't wait to get the 2 x R905's I have be apporved to order (and the EqualLogic PS500E when I get the quote...assuming we have enough in the budget to cover it! Gulp!)
 
Associate
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The issue with Dell was never really kit, it was management and support.

Dell support and vision really went off the rails a few years ago, it appears to be coming back.

The ML1000e blade chassis is interesting and the R9xx annihilates the competition on a purely cost basis.

Just depends if you want/are used to SIM/Tivoli or Openmanage and can afford to look elsewhere.
 
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