I lost a drive in my iSCSI array, so I snapped a few pics as I replaced the drive. If you’ve never seen what using an array looks like, read on…
PS5000E
(It’s the black 3U on top, the HP gizmo is a tape library…)
The Equallogic PS5000E (recently Equallogic was bough by Dell) is a 3U iSCSI array. Mine has 2 controllers with 2GB of battery backed cache memory and 8 1TB SATA drives, expandable with 8 more (total of 16 1TB drives). With a hot spare and RAID overhead, 8TB of raw capacity translates into a little more than 5 TB usable of RAID-5. Each controller has 3 Gig NIC’s, and does load balancing across the NIC’s within the array (easy!). This is “just” an iSCSI array, it doesn’t do “filer’ functions like NFS or CIFS.
Now owned by Dell
PS5000E Rear
Like most arrays, these come with a web based GUI. Mine looks like this.
PS5000 Main Menu
I logged in the other day, and noticed these errors in the event log. (Look at the gray, and read from the bottom up.) Drive 4 had failed. Good thing I had a dedicated hot spare assigned (drive 7), the array automatically off-lined the failed drive, and used the hot spare. No one noticed anything. I tried reseating the failed drive, but that didn’t help.
Replacing the drive is easy. Dell overnights you the replacement. It’s nicely packed, complete with instructions and return label.
This is just a regular old SATA drive, in a fancy Equallogic drive sled. The sled is a pretty fancy one, with an extra circuit board at the rear of the drive. Dell wants $2500 each for these drives (WTF!?!) I’ve seen 250 GB drives in these sleds on eBay for less than $50. You could buy one of those, and then put the correct 1TB drive in it for a couple of hundred dollars. Of course, that would void your warranty 🙂
Drive in the fancy sled
Take the old drive out. You don’t have to tell the array you’re going to do this with the GUI first, just yank it out, the array figures it out
Remove the drive
Stick the replacement in. That’s all there is to it.
Once the new drive was inserted, the array automatically started using it, and declared it to be the new hot spare. These events were now displayed:
1-BLADE M1000
2-SERVER MODEL M600
1-EQUAL LOGIC PS 6000
1-SWITCH PowerConnect 2464
10-UTP-CERTIFIED CAT-6
ALL CONNECTED WORKSTATIONS 1-GB
Keep all STANDARD INFRASTRUCTURE
THIS IS A PART OF WHICH I HAVE IN MY OTHER DATA CENTER EQUIPMENT ARE MORE SERVER 2850 and Dell PowerConnect with doors at 1-GB,
MY PROBLEM IS THAT I WANT TO INTEGRATE THE BLED PS 600 LOGIC EQUAL TO DRIVE THE M600 WHERE ARE THE DATABASE THAT IS WHAT HAPPENS …? On integration than I have now, OK … THAT WHEN PLACED THE LINKS FROM THE LOGIC EQUAL TO THE SWITCH AND SWITCH TO THE BLADE M600 WHERE ARE BOTH HAVE PROBLEMS READING AND WRITING TO THE DATABASE, WHICH RISES UP A 100% READING AND WRITING TO 100% BY VOLUME OF DATA THAT Writes SIMUNTANE IN EQUAL LOGIC PROBLEM AND DETERMINE WHICH TEAM IS EQUAL TO BRING LOGIC AND DATABASE TO disk with the M600 DE 10.2 KY IF I HAVE A BETTER ANSWER, WHAT WOULD THE BEST SOLUTION TO LOCATE THE LOGIC EQUAL AS MY DATA STORAGE USING TWO WITHOUT ME increases both the writing and reading ENGINE DATABASE.
IF ANYONE CAN HELP ME PLEASE WRITE
Hi Greg,
I have that same SAN (years later of course). Just lost a drive. Unit is now End of Life. Can’t find a drive but I have a buddy that will sell me his old unit with 16 drives for $500. Question is, will I need to do anything to “wipe out” the drives that are in his unit before I can use it or will the array just figure it out? Thoughts?
Thanks
Norb