topic Re: EVA 5000 Failure in Disk Enclosures

EVA 5000 Failure

Manoj_28 — Sun, 19 Sep 2004 10:17:08 GMT

Hi,

We have an EVA500 running VCS 3.014 failed.
Today a single disk failure brought the entire system down. Still the system is not and HP services working on this. Anybody have similar experiance. Both the controllers are saying configuration missing.

Regards
Manoj

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

David Bodey — Mon, 20 Sep 2004 01:50:09 GMT

Hi Manoj,

I have a EVA 3000 which we upgraded to VCS V3.014 last July. Two weeks ago we too had a faulty disk drive which possibly caused the EVA to go 'offline'. By the time I got into Command View EVA, the storage system was reported as Uninitialised. All I could see was a Hardware tree with the two controllers with red crosses. Drilling down to the controllers, they were both in the red. I noticed on the "Device Ports" tab that the both ports for each controller were in a Operational State of "failed", with a button to "Enable"/ I did the enable on all ports on both controllers and the storage came back as usual, with 1 drive dropped out of the disk groups and another marked as bad.

HP were unable to come up with an actual cause and have asked me to keep an eye on the HSV logs for issues with "loops 1A and 1B for any irrational behaviour".

Would be very interested to hear how you go Manoj as I am very concerned about the current reliability of the EVA.

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Manoj_28 — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 01:41:27 GMT

Hi All,

It was sad to say that Hp services couldnt bring our EVA5000 up and running. Still the EVA is down and HP report says metatdata is lost and they cant recover the data or the disk structure.

Only option is to re-initialise the system.

Still the system is down

Regards
manoj

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Alzhy — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 10:30:44 GMT

Manoj,

We have the exact same problems some time ago and another weird one just a week ago which literally took HP 24+ plus to recover. We are also at 3.014. HP has enabled ILF Logging in the hope to capture info for them to fix their EVA code/firmware/os..

Say.. are your EVA's also connected to HP-U systems or a mix? Are you running Business Copy as well?

Due to this glaring fact that the "Enterprise" Virtual Array is not a perfect single array solution, and due to the fact that Business COPy cannot mirror accross EVA's - we are thinking of employing VxVM to mirror accross 2 EVA's so in such a catastrophic event -- we can non-disruptively survive/failover to the surving EVA(s)... hopefully the chances of having 2 EVA 5K's fail at the same time is unlikely...

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

David Bodey — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 18:44:14 GMT

The latest response I have had from HP is "... to upgrade to VCS3.020 and also update the drive firmware using the 3.021 superfile". The disk firmware to go to HP05 (currently on HP03).

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Manoj_28 — Wed, 22 Sep 2004 23:27:58 GMT

Dear All,

hp engineering says to upgrade VCS 3020 AND drive firm firware to 3021.

hp sying "similar" problems are resolved in the abovesaid versions.Its important that hp is still not clear about the problem. The word "similar" indicates that.

So still our EVA is down and we are waiting fo the report from hp engineering.

HP has enabled ILF Logging and captured info for them.

Our EVA was connected only to couple of NAS clusters HP 4000s and some of other windows hosts.

Regards
Manoj

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Alzhy — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 07:27:08 GMT

I doubt at all if VCS 3.020 will fix things.. The fix will come from us sites that have been enabled with ILF logging and hopefully a recurrence will happen. We've been on it for about 1 week now. They've so far upgraded disk firmware as some of you have.

I pose again my question to the gentlemen on this thread.. Are your EVAs connected to HP-UX environments solely? Are you running SecurePath 3.0D? Intense Business Copy jobs?

Just trying to get some common denominator here..

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Alzhy — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 07:37:22 GMT

Manoj,

I did not read your reply in its entirety.. so youe EVAs are both UNIX and Windoze connected.

So with ILF logging enabled.. did your environment already have a recurrence of the failure? It will be very valuable for HP to come up with a fix for us sites that have been plagued with EVA problems...

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Ruth Lutes — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 08:30:56 GMT

Manoj,

I am very concerned about the situation you describe. Please provide your case details so I can understand why your EVA has not been recovered. I will contact you about your case number.

Ruth Lutes
EVA Quality & Customer Satisfaction

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

David Bodey — Thu, 23 Sep 2004 19:00:54 GMT

For the record, in my case the EVA3000 is in Australia and used to server only two OpenVMS servers. I am not using Business Copy.

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

dominic_7 — Sat, 12 Mar 2005 01:23:14 GMT

Hello Manoj ,

This is really serious .
You say HP was not able to recover nor support.

I 'd really be interested in knowing the
current status of your EVA .

Did you manage to finally upgrade to VCS 3020 ?
Any ways 3.014 is not that ancient , and
should not have been a cause of failure .

How is the power situation at your end ?

let me know .

thanks & regards

Dominic

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Andy McCreath — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 04:56:59 GMT

Morning Manoj,

Could you please provide me with the final results too.
We are in the same situation as you.

Many thanks,

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Manoj_28 — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 02:19:09 GMT

Hi,

We reinitilized the system

Regards
manoj

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Donald Robichaud — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 10:00:06 GMT

I am very interested in this thread. We were an early adopter of the EVA technology a couple of years ago. We were still testing the unit when we had a disk go bad and lost our entire disk group. At that time VCS was running a 1.x flavor version. Manoj's entries bring back some very painful memories. We had other issues and swapped out the EVA for something else. I find it interesting that the same problems appear to be happening and am concerned because our management has decided to purchase an EVA5000, because of assurances the past problems have been fixed.

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Derek_31 — Sun, 27 Mar 2005 23:18:48 GMT

I can tell you that I was going to buy some EVAs and after hearing many horror stories (here and elsewhere) we will not be buying them. Instead we are going with the XP 12000. That will put more money into HP's pocket, so they don't really lose out. But I would not trust my data to the EVA. Maybe the next generation EVA will be better.

On the flip side, I have dozens of MSA-1000s that I've been using for a number of years and have not lost a single byte of data in 3 years.

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Donald Robichaud — Mon, 28 Mar 2005 14:15:18 GMT

Thanks for the input Derek. We have an EMA8000 and have not had any issues. We also have older Storageworks boxes with HSJ controllers on legacy systems and have never had any major issues.

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Alzhy — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 10:02:04 GMT

If you have to use EVA's.. be sure you have a mirroring/failover between at least 2 EVA's. NEVER use just a single EVA as the EVA is not a very good single array solution.

I can suggest VxVM as your mirroring acrross 2 EVA's solution. It works well with SecurePath and hopefully the next generation of EVA's wil be more reliable and support native VxVM DMP so you won't have to need SecurePath.

FYI.. we just migrated from EVA5Ks to an XP12K where scalability is excellent and performance is predictable.

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Donald Robichaud — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 10:47:32 GMT

This is a question for Andy if he is still reading these responses. What happened with your EVA and did you have any downtime associated with fixing the problem? Thanks and thanks to everybody for their comments and suggestions.

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

Swami — Tue, 29 Mar 2005 23:33:44 GMT

Hi,

We are using EVA3000 for last 2 years & got 2 Hard disks replaced as well but it didn't caused any issue with data.

Currently we r in process to move our Production data to new EVA5000.

Is there any serius reliability issue with EVA5000?

Need some inputs from EVA experts.

TIA,
Swami

Re: EVA 5000 Failure

dominic_7 — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 08:04:37 GMT

I've seen a lot of references and recommendations to Veritas VXVM for mirroring across two EVAs .

HAsn't any one tried HPs Continous Access EVA , CA EVA ? which is the controller based
replication s/w offering with EVA ?

Also I've had a disk failure on a EVA with
single disk protection and VRAID1 , i did not lose anything .

All the people who have mentioned losing Disk groups because of a single disk failure ,have either created DISK GROUPS
with "NO" protection and used VRAID0
since no clarification has been made inthis regard.

Dominic
dominic@computerpoint.co.ug