MSA2012sa all freaked out.

[BDay]

I think I ticked off Murphy somehow.

Yesterday we had RAID Controller B in a dual controler MSA2012sa have its "SuperCap" fail so HP sent a replacement controller this morning. We installed the new controller and not 5 minutes after doing so power supply 1 died as well so we replaced that with a PSU from another MSA2012sa that is not yet in production. I'll have to call that in to get replaced.

Curiously after replacing these two components 4 of the 48 drives went into "Leftover" state and wanted metadata cleaned from them, two vDisks are quarantined, two vDisks critical, and one vDisk started rebuilding as it appeared to lose a drive. How the heck did this happen by just replacing a controller and PSU?

Looking at the quarantined vDisks it tells me some of the disks are "Down", yet if you look in the disk status list they all show "Up" and available. Has anyone ever seen something like that? I tried reseating the drives and that hasn't changed anything. I also fully powered down the MSA and brought it back online with no change to be seen.

Both controllers are at the latest firmware and all of the disk chassis are also at their own latest firmware.

All comments or questions are welcomed. :)

[BDay]

Update on this. Today's tech (I think that makes it 5 or 6 we've worked with) found that one of the I/O modules in the first expansion unit is trying to control virtual disks that the other module is already controlling. They want to replace that and send an HP storage tech on site to take a look at the thing.

[nuyori]

How did you resolve this problem or what HP storage technician(s) did to resolve this problem?

I have experienced more problems with MSA2012sa than with MSA2312sa for example.

Due to the nature of MSA2012sa being unreliable, we have hard time trying to get them into production.

As far as I am concerned, these units are definitely not built redundancy in mind as in the worst case scenario the whole disk array can disappear due to single PSU failure, even though it has two PSU's.

[Bhavnish Kamboj (BK)]

Are you at latest firmware. If not then do it ASAP. There are many critical updates available on HP site.

[nuyori]

Firmware updates are obvious steps to fix problems but if hardware obviously is faulty, then there is little firmware can fix.

I have played this firmware update game nearly 2 years by now. If I only would have known how unreliable these units are, I definitely would have taken MSA2312sa or any other brand into production.