topic Re: Removing a shelf from an EVA3000 in MSA Storage

Removing a shelf from an EVA3000

Scott McMullan — Tue, 07 Apr 2009 18:03:58 GMT

I have an EVA3000 that is being decommissioned (slowly). We're running short on power, and I want to take shelves offline and power them down when they are no longer needed, at least until I'm down to two shelves.

Is there a procedure for doing this without interrupting service on the EVA?

Re: Removing a shelf from an EVA3000

Terri Harris — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:19:50 GMT

Are you able to confirm that at least one shelf has drives that are no longer part of any Disk Group? That are actually Ungrouped?

Re: Removing a shelf from an EVA3000

Scott McMullan — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:44:30 GMT

Absolutely.

I actually have four shelves, two of which are completely devoid of assigned disks. My one disk group (default) is wholly contained in shelves 1 and 2.

Re: Removing a shelf from an EVA3000

Terri Harris — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:10:33 GMT

One other question then...what is the product number of this EVA? Its the cabling I'm concerned with, if you just power off the given enclosures, Command View & the EVA controllers will be unhappy.

Re: Removing a shelf from an EVA3000

Uwe Zessin — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 05:09:44 GMT

I have never seen an official document for this - most environments grow ;-)

What I would do:

- ungroup all disk drives from the enclosure

- with the help of the buttom, signoff all disk drives in that enclosure from the EVA namespace and remove physically. Use and pull the disk drive one-by-one and then wait (let's say 2 minutes) to give the controller software some time to settle.

- modify the back-end cabeling of the first loop to remove the first enclosure. Again, wait some time and carefully check all links to make sure the loop has recovered.

- alter the second loop and then remove the enclosure from the EAB/CAN as well.

- power off the enclosure

Re: Removing a shelf from an EVA3000

Scott McMullan — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 10:04:57 GMT

I have no idea what the product number is, sorry. I wasn't aware that there were different sorts of cabling for these.

I agree, most environments do grow, as did ours. We grew until this was almost as big as it would get (4 shelves, and a 50/50 mix of 146 and 300GB drives). However, post-warranty support costs were prohibitive, especially given the changes in the storage market. We were able to upgrade to another leading vendor's solution (and we already have 2 other units from that company), with better performance, more capacity and the ability to more than double the capacity later, for less money than the next three years' support (aka the warranty period of the new device).

We were able to sell off our 300GB EVA drives in the secondary market, but haven't find a buyer for the rest of it. There are a few loads still on here, and we'll be using it for DR testing, but we don't need all the shelves live for that.