topic Re: VA7400 - Data Unavailable Varning in Disk Enclosures

VA7400 - Data Unavailable Varning

Kimmo Glaborg — Thu, 13 Nov 2003 02:00:27 GMT

Hello

We have pretty much same problem as Brian Duthie posted in Feb with our VA7400.

# armrecover -s VA

Array State:
Warning

THE FOLLOWING WARNING(S) EXIST:
- Data Unavailable
- Redundancy Loss
- Rebuild Failed
No recovery needed on array VA01.
# armdsp VA

WARNINGS

WARNING: The controller cannot retrieve some portion of host data.

WARNING: A rebuild operation failed.

WARNING: Some data in the device lacks redundancy, and is exposed to becoming unavailable if further drive removals or failures occur.

From what I've seen so far we really dont have any dataloss for the moment, we cant"just" backup our NW6 servers volumes on the array. I think the varnings prevents us from upgrading Firmware of controller and disks, could be a problem? So what could be the plan, except replacing the 7400... ? Please help. My logs are attached.

Re: VA7400 - Data Unavailable Varning

Marco Hogeveen — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 02:28:35 GMT

I see that your VA7400 still has HP16 Firmware, please call HP Support and let an engineer have a look at your VA (and upgrade the FW to HP18). It looks like your VA is in serious trouble.

Marco.

Re: VA7400 - Data Unavailable Varning

Simon White — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 04:44:50 GMT

We had exactly the same problem with our VA7400. HP tried quite a few things, upgraded firmware to HP 18, replaced controllers and disks. The only available solution was to replace the whole VA7400 which is what we did and without data loss.
We are waiting to hear from HP as to what casued this problem. Our configuation consisted of three W2K servers, dual fibre pathed through 2 HP fibre switches.

Re: VA7400 - Data Unavailable Varning

Kimmo Glaborg — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 05:41:26 GMT

We had an onsite HP Engineer here that went trough the logs and he found a cache problem in one of the controllers, so that needs to be replaced as well as a firmware upgrade to HP18. He also recommended us not to run AutoRAID on the 7400 (?). I'll keep update to this post as soon as we get the and HW FW updates to work. Thanks for help.

Re: VA7400 - Data Unavailable Varning

Ian Hillier — Fri, 14 Nov 2003 10:26:36 GMT

I have had multiple problems with controllers on my VA7400. C1 was replaced twice and LCC1 (on a DS2400) was replaced once. Another option besides upgrading to HP18, which I STRONGLY recommend, is to upgrade the firmware on the disks. It is an offline operation, so plan some downtime.

We did this a couple of weeks ago and have been very stable (so far) and our logs look a lot cleaner.

Regards,

John