MDS600 - false fan failure alerts

[John T Willis]

Had a problem for three weeks finally resolved.

The WBEM agents kept reporting Fan1 in Box1 had failed. Shortly later it reported Fan OK.

This continued for a while, but seemed to increase in frequency until called for a part replacement.

Replacing the fan part did not help. Same alerts continued.

Swapped fans and power supplies from the alternate drawer and that did not help.

The drives remained operational, until I took the attached server offline and tried power cycling the MDS600.

Then both fans for one drawer Blinked Amber, i/o module and power supplies were all green.. but the server attached to the i/o module reported no i/o module and no drives.

All of the formerly running drives were dark.

No power seemed to be getting through to the drives.

HP sent a new SPS-HDD  (Switching Power Supply and Hard Disk Drive) backplane and drawer assembly.

Replaced it and powered up, initially same thing.. discovered however the drawer wasn't pushed all the way in and probably didn't have contact with the i/o module.. or a post repair status had not completed.

Anyway

Pushed drawer fully into place, power cycled, all fans, modules, power supplies went green and the server could now see the i/o module and found the drives.  Initial power up behavior seems to be to blink all devices Amber four times.. then go green after some sort of status check.. so no need to panic for the first few blinks.

Lessons learned.

1. fan alerts can indicate back plane failures or pending back plane failures

2. do not power cycle the MDS600 unless your prepared for the system to be offline, or have spare MDS600 parts available

P.S. This thread has been moved from General to Disk array.- Hp Forum Moderator