MSA 1510i No end of trouble - config lost

[jbriley3]

Installed the unit almost one year ago. Took almost three months for HP to resolve the orig problem - servers would lose connection with the iSAN drives. FINALLY, after the fourth install of a new MSA controller, it started working.

Haven't shut it down since then, until last Friday. Used the MSA manual for steps to shut it down and to start up again. Once started, it wasn't working right. Investigation showed that it had LOST it's configuration. Took HOURS to get it reconfigured. Afraid to shut down again. Is there some way to assure that the config. is saved? Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

[Ender_]

My only suggestion with the MSA1510i is to get rid of it. It is not a stable solution, there other SAN's are great but the 1510i is a hack job.
I've had to replace two 1510i's at two different clients after a catastrophic failure. HP didn't have any solution to the issues.

[Mark H. Wood]

If you followed the manual, it should have worked.  (We have to reboot ours weekly due to controller hangs and general weirdness, like all arrays vanishing from the mgt. interface.)

The config. is stored somewhere on the lowest-numbered drive shelf.  You must ensure that all drive shelves are powered up and settled (have their bus-number assignments on the back-panel display) before the controllers start, or they'll come up with factory settings.  We found that out the hard way when we added a shelf and it came in at a lower number than the ones we had -- the originals were cabled to an unfortunate choice of adaptor ports.  If you added a shelf to a low-numbered port, I couldn't say where the config. is until the next reboot.

I have some scripts that log on once a week and suck the configuration data out to a file, so at least I know what to reconfigure should it happen again.  (Well, had -- they stopped working with a recent upgrade to putty/plink.)

Indeed, this product does not get enough love from the maintainers.