EVA 5000 Cache Battery Nightmare

[James Crivellone]

We recently reactivated one of our older EVA SAN's (5000) and am running into issues with cache batteries.

The EVA sat for awhile, so of course the batteries died over the years.  All 4 are marked as bad currently on both controllers.  

I put a call into HP to 2 day me some new batteries, however after 2 weeks of (we don't know where they are) or (I'm sorry I cannot update you on your order status) I said to hell with it and cracked them open.

Thankfully I noticed that the Hawker Energy 2V 5AH batteries are still made(Albeit under the EnerSys brand now)

So we rebuilt two of the packs, batteries are fully charged, nice and happy.

Slap one in, instantly marked as FAILED (voltage reads perfectly however), the second one came up as working, however the charger never kicked in and let it die overnight.

I just rebuilt another cell, and once again marked as FAILED.

Looking closely at the PCB I noticed a **bleep** EEPROM which I'm guessing tracks battery charging history (Thanks!)

Does anyone have any ideas?  This system is out of support, we are not buying another one, HP won't sell me the batteries without some long and drawn out excuse as to why they cannot find them at the warehouse, and now it seems I cannot even replace the cells myself because of the way the boards are designed (Assuming the EEPROM onboard is the issue)

I don't suppose HP hid an option somewhere on the controller to reset battery status and let me use my EVA that I paid for?

[Johan Guldmyr]

Many of the these EVAs have had issue with some corrosion inside the controllers where the battery-module connects. Perhaps you have this too?

Perhaps a restart of the controller is needed. There have been many firmware improvements in regards to the batteries. If there are any battery-events in the controller event log perhaps these can give you a hint about the issues too.

When new batteries are installed they are usually charged by the EVA - this takes a while.