Resiliency of blade enclosure

[chuckk281]

Meg had customer questions regarding the resiliency of the blade enclosure:

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I have a customer that is looking to replace their internal ATCA platform with Blades.  Because they sell to Telcos (ie AT&T etc) they are super concerned with how a server reacts to “events”.  So here are just some of the questions they asked me…yes I know the likelihood of a dual failure is remote, but they plan for worse, worse case

1. In a c7000 if BOTH Onboard Administrators (OA) fail, what is the impact on the blades (assume that power is still on)
2. If BOTH OAs fail and for some reason the enclosure needs to power cycle, will the blades come up or will the fact that the OAs are down prevent this.
3. Same two questions for dual interconnect failures, whether it be the primary LAN ones (slot 1 and 2) or dual failures in other slots.

So I know that without the OAs, ilo is unavailable and you can’t manage the enclosure, but assume the blades would be ok.  As for the interconnects, the obvious would be no network connectivity, unless they had another pair of interconnects in other bays.

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Monty provided Meg with answers:

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1 – if both OA modules fail, the enclosure continues to operate – but all the fans will detect loss of communication with the OA and ramp to a high speed to continue cooling all the blades and interconnects.

2 – if both OA modules fail and the enclosure power is cycled – no blades or interconnects will be powered as there is no OA granting power requests  (but that would be three failures).

3 – dual interconnect failures will interrupt server connectivity to those two bays.  If those two bays are the ones that the servers are configured for redundant connections – then connections to that network are interrupted.

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Hope this info helps. Have you had good succcess with the resiliency of the blade chassis?