HPE Smart Storage Battery for HPE Smart Array P440/4G Controller.

[Torsten.]

What server model do you have?

[parnassus]

Hi!

Short answer: HPE Product Number L9N12A (the sticker says: HP DL180 Gen9 E5-2609v3 SP8027TV EU Svr) came pre-equipped with HPE Smart Array P440/4G from factory, 8GB DDR4 (I then purchased separately 4x16 GB DDR4 banks and HPE disks) and 8 LFF Disks Cage.

Long answer: this thread where you contributed yet.

Side note: the Server is finally in my own hands today but I hadn't time - while I'm writing this post - to verify IF the pre-equipped HPE Smart Array P440/4G came with the HPE Smart Storage Battery or not (this explains why I started this thread after I read the relevant QS document with that note)...wait...the distributor wrote in the selling document "...with battery"...so I'm PROBABLY safe. Eureka!

The point is I don't trust what the Distributor wrote, I must see...because they could have translated the FWBC with "with Battery" and they didn't wrote "with HPE Smart Storage Battery" explicitly. I'll check tomorrow morning.

At this point all the HPE Smart Storage Battery related doubts I raised above will continue to be valid...probably they gain more significance if the HPE Smart Controller P440/4G is purchased as a separate option (not pre-equipped)...

[parnassus]

Update: the DL180 Gen9 factory equipped with the HPE Smart Array P440/4G with 4G FWBC was also factory equipped with the HPE Smart Storage Battery kit, I've taken a shot:

 So far, so good.

[Torsten.]

Looks like your problem is solved now ...

[parnassus]

Well, not.

I was only lucky (shame on me!) in purchasing a pre-factored HPE ProLiant DL180 Gen9 Server model pre-equipped with the HPE Smart Array P440/4G and the proper HPE Smart Storage Battery...but, even if the doubt of receiving a Server equipeed without that HPE Smart Storage Battery passed away, that was the reason I initially raised all those (theoretical) questions.

I think that would be interesting to definitely understand if those questions are still valid or not: think if the HPE Smart Storage Battery will suddenly fail (or if it, as written, was not available at Server purchase time)...which impairments will hit the Server storage subsystem and which restictions will hit the Server deployment (no RAID6?), apart storage subsystem performance's degradation?

Probably too theoretical...

[Torsten. · Accepted solution]

Older controllers were sold with or without cache, so such controller without cache cannot do RAID5 or RAID6 at all. Your controller has always cache integrated, so it can do these RAID levels.

Yesterday I had a DL360 Gen9 with a P440ar installed and a completely failed storage battery. The RAID (it was RAID1 and RAID5) was accessible, but the performance was low. So the server will work without or with a failed battery, but slow.

You can test this too, set up your server, power off, disconnect the battery and power up - just to prof it.

[parnassus]

Thanks Torsten, that's exactly what I want to test...so the presence/absence of the HPE Smart Storage Battery doesn't impair HPE Smart Array Controller's features (e.g. the ability to deploy various RAID levels according to Controller capabilities), it has a direct impact on the Controller's performance.

The 2G/4G FWBC module is another matter...I know.

[Jimmy Vance]

I just tested and the newer controllers like the P440 don't appear to have the limitations of the older controllers requireing a battery to create or modify advanced RAID levels. The older controllers would still function at their current level with a bad battery, you just couldn't modify or add an array.

[parnassus]

That's a good info! Thanks for testing!

Now I'm facing another question HPE Smart Array P440/4G related to "Offline - without SPP - Firmware update" but I'm going to open another Thread about that here (Solved, thanks again to @Jimmy Vance and @Torsten.).

[PCW_INTAS]

Hi Jimmy

I don't know if we can reopen this thread but I have the same problem with the P440 controller batteries but in my case "just buy a battery" is not an option. I have approached the local HP resellers with a request for supply of replacement batteries for our G9 servers (67 of them) and they said that they could provide one. One battery! Stocks in Australia are otherwise out and there are supposedly no after-market suppliers either. Is this as a result of a trend perhaps?

Irrespective of that, the thought of having to go around the country to replace all the cache batteries every couple of years is not something I want to have to do. Some of our sites are remote with no on-site tech support.

Our servers are used for air traffic control. So far we have had nearly 20% of them fail with bad batteries and warranty is yet to run out (although imminent). In at least one case, the failure brought down the server with temporary loss of access to the disk sub-system requiring technician attendance to initiate a reboot. As you may imagine with ATC we cannot afford unscheduled outages so the fact that we could recover operations is of no comfort. We instal our systems with duplicated high reliability UPS systems and generator backup. Power outages are not something we can reasonably allow nor are unscheduled server crashes.

The fact that these systems will apparently run quite happily without batteries suggests to me that we should be able to simply remove them. Given our high availability power systems, I suggest that that will improve reliability and the loss of performance will in our case go unnoticed. I have suggested this to HP support personnel and the local reseller and met resistance to the suggestion. Alternatively could we not go the super cap route? My enquiries along those lines have also been fruitless so far.

We have DL360s with Raid 1 and DL380s with Raid 1 plus Raid 5.

Regards

Peter