topic Disk Firmware upgrade in Disk Enclosures

Disk Firmware upgrade

Darren Keenan — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 11:47:57 GMT

We have an EVA 5000 used by several hosts, and we have to upgrade the firmware on the hard drives.
1) Does anyone have a good link on where I can find the correct procedure?
2) How are spare disks handled (which are not attached at the time of the upgrade)? A coworker suggested that the array should be smart enough to automatically "roll in" the new firmware to a newly inserted disk. (Perhaps the link for #1 will address this issue).
3) I did see one reference to the process taking about 4 minutes per disk, but if it is a serial process, that would create an unacceptibly long down time, so I didn't trust that process.
Thanks.

Re: Disk Firmware upgrade

Uwe Zessin — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 14:32:42 GMT

Darren,

2) The EVA does automatically upgrade a disk drive enclosure's EMU, but there is no auto-upgrade capability for disk drives.

The VCS V3.020 firmware is about 4.5 MBytes. A load file for an individual disk drive is about 600 KBytes and, last time I checked, there were 8 different files.

3) I have never timed it, but 4 minutes is way not enough, because you can only update an ungrouped disk.

There is a special load image to update all disk drives at once, but what happens is this:

- a service engineer load this image into the system

- VCS shuts down (no host I/O!!) and the controllers execute this image

- all disk drives are loaded at once

- the controllers reboot with VCS

It should take about 10 minutes, but during this process the entire storage array is down! Such an action must be planned very carefully - if something goes wrong during the update process you can end up with up to 240 dead disk drives and a total data loss!

Re: Disk Firmware upgrade

Darren Keenan — Wed, 12 Jan 2005 14:36:01 GMT

Thanks. Very useful information - especially about the mass update.