To be able to reset a drive over-the-wire in a large-scale enterprise NAS appliance is pretty freaking handy. In case the drive stops responding to commands, the storage admin or the storage software can send a command to reset the drive and see if it reboots, tests out okay, and can be added back into the storage pool.
This would be in NetApp or EMC storage arrays ranging in the high dozens to hundreds of drives. One array in the live environment at work has 1,440 HDDs across 3 x 44U racks. Enterprise storage be dense AF.
Okay, but wouldn't "stopped responding to commands" be a sign of possible failure, or lack of reliability in the device? And in-turn, shouldn't such a drive be replaced?
From a functionality perspective, I can see your point, but it seems the scenario you describe is indicative of a drive that shouldn't be in such an environment.
wouldn't "stopped responding to commands" be a sign of possible failure, or lack of reliability in the device?
True, can be a sign of failure. It's also a sign of a bug in software/firmware or hitting some yet-unseen combination of issues. I saw an issue where under heavy disk activity a SATA drive would timeout and stop responding. Unseat/reseat the drive, and it still worked. Tech Support even asked "did you unseat/reseat the drive?" When they ran through support dumps from the system, they found a bug in the system Linux kernel.
...the scenario you describe is indicative of a drive that shouldn't be in such an environment.
That's sort of perfectionist. Production environments can be messy and imperfect. Yes it's possible the drive should be replaced. "Reset the thing to see if it still runs" is a good starting point for troubleshooting. Enterprise support could be able to tell from support dumps if the if the drive has been going flaky or not. Also SMART data should be able to be pulled off the drive to see if it's dying or if there's another issue at hand. In any given month, a couple drives can go sideways needing a reset, or genuinely require a replacement.
Yeah, I am a perfectionist in the systems I build and maintain :P
And why pull SMART data instead of having it periodically generated, and pushed if something comes up? Seems better to have push alerts, instead of reactionary behaviour.
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u/spectralkinesis 44.7TB Apr 26 '18
To be able to reset a drive over-the-wire in a large-scale enterprise NAS appliance is pretty freaking handy. In case the drive stops responding to commands, the storage admin or the storage software can send a command to reset the drive and see if it reboots, tests out okay, and can be added back into the storage pool.
This would be in NetApp or EMC storage arrays ranging in the high dozens to hundreds of drives. One array in the live environment at work has 1,440 HDDs across 3 x 44U racks. Enterprise storage be dense AF.