Side effects of a blackout on c7000 switches & passthru

[Enrico Ferro]

Hi all,

a few days ago we had a general blackout on our data center. We have about 15 HP c7000 enclosure. When the power came up, we found that almost all switches cisco 3020, 3120x e and FC passthru were not operational, with a blue light.
We manually removed and reconnected each interconnect device, and everything started to work again.
What is the meaning of this blue alert light? We had a similar blackout in the past but without this strange behavior.

Thank you very much for your suggestions,
best regards.

[Michael A. McKenney]

I would consider a better UPS solution.

[Zygmunt Krawczyk]

This may be OA firmware issue. My suggestion is to upgrade OA to the latest firmware 3.21.

[Robert_Jewell · Accepted solution]

I would suppose each switch's LED meanings could differ, but a blue LED for the ethernet passthru interconnects usually just mean the interconnect is active.

The behavior is indeed strange, but really not unexpected when you have a sudden power down. The modules would expect the backplane to have already been powered on when they themselves are powered on, so likely the problem was caused by a timing issue due to everything coming online at the same time.

I agree with the prev. post - check and update the OA/enclosure firmware.

-Bob

[Trygve Henriksen]

Also, add a delay to the startup of each device in the c7000 enclosures.

- Enclosure Information
- Enclosure Settings
- Device Power Sequence

With 15 c7000 and lots of servers, switches and other goodies coming on at the same time, you get a massive surge in power usage.

Set the Interconnect bays to start first(give them a few seconds between each), then the Device bays. 5 - 10 seconds between each server seems like a good idea.

[Enrico Ferro]

Thank very much you for all your suggestions!

[Enrico Ferro]

Thanks