MSA500 Storage Unit and Controller Failure

[Ghena]

Just to set up the situation: we have two Proliant DL380 G4 servers with Windows 2000 Server SP4 Enterprise and Exchange 2000 SP3 installed on a two-node active/passive cluster.
The cluster nodes are connected via SmartArray 6400 controllers to an MSA500 GB storage unit with a pair of redundant controllers.

Using ACU, I deleted an array which held a RAID5 logical drive. When I committed the changes in ACU, I could see activity in ACU for about 30 seconds; then the ACU browser froze and stayed that way for about 45 minutes.

Finally, I decided to reboot the active node, logged on to the server, and opened ACU to access the external storage and an "error detected" message appeared. I checked HP System Management and found that one controller was in offline/active state and the other was in OK/passive state.

Based simply on what I saw, I assume that the controllers were "stuck" and for some reason failover, well, failed, so no communication was possible at all between the server and the storage device.

I thought of shutting down the active node, restarting the storage device, and restarting the active node, but was afraid that restarting the storage device might have interrupted the array deletion process and caused a bigger problem.

Wonder if anyone has ever seen such an event occur and what could have caused the link to the external storage to drop? Or, is there some log file that could tell me what went wrong with the link?

[get_vell]

any luck with this?