Smart Array: is it possible to find array ownership from a bunch of disks.

[chuckk281]

Vasyl had a storage array question:

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One of our customer in emergency (fire) has removed more than hundred of HDDs from dozens of Gen8 servers (with Smart Arrays) without marking their ownership/position. As you can imaging now he is unable to find what HDDs are belong to what server.

Do we have a procedure to analyze fingerprint/array ID or something like this to combine proper array sets?

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Input from Linar:

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That’s interesting. I believe SmartArrays store configuration on each drive (that’s how they identify an alien drive) so it should be technically possible to read that metadata and sort the drives using a plain controller with a SAS JBOD box.

Once a set of drives is identified though, I don’t know how it could be matched with a specific controller (i.e. the original server)

I hope there is a solution better than that though…

Check this out also.

After a bit more digging, it seems that ADU functionality is now part of ‘ACU Diagnostics’ (I admit, I haven’t been working with these for a long while).

The ACU Diagnostics feature replaced the Array Diagnostic Utility supported by SmartStart v8.20 and earlier. Beginning with ACU v8.70.9, the diagnostics functionality within ACU has expanded and includes the SmartSSD Wear Gauge. ACU generates […] Array diagnostic report.

Assuming ACU Diagnostics show the same level of details as ADU did, we should be able to recover the following:

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Run ACU Diagnostics on each server to identify Configuration Signature stored in the controller

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Populate server drive bays with drives, tell the controller to ignore configuration changes so that it doesn't write anything to the drives

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Boot using an ISO image and run ACU Diagnostics to create a report. It will tell you a Configuration Signature of each drive it discovers (from drive RIS area).

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Power off, stick a label to each drive, remove, repeat with the next batch

At the end you’ll have each drive labeled with Configuration Signature so that drives could be sorted and installed in the right servers.

Hope this helps,

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Comments or other suggestions?