MSA1000 Power down question

[Bryce Turner]

I have been asked by management to develop a "shutdown procedure" for the data center that would happen on some kind of periodic basis (not sure how often at this point - still being discussed).

My question is this....

How resilient is the MSA1000 (including drives, etc....) to a periodic shutdown? Is this good/bad practice? Anything I should be concerned with or aware of?

For some reason, when I was first asked to do this my gut was telling me that unless there is an emergency we should not "spin down" the drives in the MSA1000.

Any thoughts?

[ssudhir]

I dont think you need a periodic shutdown for MSA,unless you have any specific reason like power save ..

[Bryce Turner]

We are not powering down just the MSA. Management wants us to shutdown the whole data center in an exercise of being able to shut down everything and then bring everything back up again in the proper order to make sure everything works properly (during a maintenance window).

When this was first requested I did not agree with this way of thinking because I thought that it could introduce a potential for failure (for instance, I have seen where you remove power from a SAN and then bring it back up again a drive fails).

Is there something to my way of thinking or am I just being overly cautious?

[Rob Leadbeater · Accepted solution]

Hi,

There's always a risk that a drive might not spin back up after a power outage - planned or otherwise - particularly if those drives have been spinning for a long time - and this risk won't be limited to the MSA1000.

I've been through a couple of complete computer room power downs, and on both occasions we had a couple of drives that didn't start back up afterwards. You mitigate the risk by ensuring everything is redundant, and that your service provider can still get hold of the relevant drives quickly...

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Rob