4/40 robotics killing our san?

[Andre_19]

Hi

We had a funny experience. During maintenance works we found that one of our servers in the san was not reachable. When booting the thing it wouldn't come up (driver loading). When further checking, we found that other servers in the san also didn't respond properly and wouldn't boot correctly. At one point we found that the library in our SAN wasn't responding properly either. We weren't able to reboot it by tool, so a poweroff was necessary. Upon rebooting a loud bang-noise occured. And funny enough, our servers were ok again.
Did anybody experience something similar? Is this maybe a firmware issue? Where should we take a look? The FC-Switch? Any hints are welcome!
Thanx
Andre

[harry d brown jr]

Take the robotic tape drive OFF the san and see what happens. Unfortunately this is just a fact of a SAN, like a LAN, if a device SPEWS garbage then everyone sees it! I suggest you hire a network specialist.

live free or die
harry

[Curtis Ballard]

It is likely that you were hearing the solenoids that lock the drawers. At power up all of them are initialized at about the same time and they make quite a loud bang. That couldn't have anything to do with the SAN being hung however. It is possible that there was some other issue causing the hang that power cycling the library cleared.

I haven't heard of any cases of the 4/40 family causing a SAN hang but it would be a good idea to update the firmware in the library if it isn't at 1.41 or better since there are improvements to the FC firmware all the time. 1.51 is currently the recommended firmware for that library.