Re: Dell-Oracle-Linux: Anyone else run this...because its not working for us!

On 11/17/05, Thomas Day <tomday2_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> Just about to replace a hard drive on our PowerVault just as soon as the
> Dell tech gets here. Doesn't sound like a very reliable machine. I'm not
> sure if it's the hard drive or the controller. But the price is right and
> the gumment loves them. Our web farm people report that they have to
> replace a hard drive once a month on the average (30 web servers).
>
> In my case I have to play with cards I'm delt but the only other time that
> I've had hard drives fail was 10 years ago when I had to work with some NCR
> pieces of junk. There, with just one machine, the controller would report a
> hard drive bad about once a week. Nothing really wrong with the drive, just
> the controller had decided to make life interesting.
>
> The tech would put in the new drive, test the "bad" drive, and return it to
> storage. I really got to practice my recovery techniques.
>
> Looks like the good old days are back again.

A week ago last Monday, a single failed hard drive in a hardware RAID 10 configuration took down a server running Oracle 10g R1 on a Dell PE 2650. Yes, that RAID volume supported the OS mount points but isn't thepoint of (hardware) RAID 10 to handle the fault and not propagate the failure to the OS?

A replacement of the failed drive and a system restart kicked in the auto-rebuild of the volume, but still I was unhappy that the unit didn't take the hit and kept ticking. I haven't had a window yet to upgrade the firmware and drivers and see if that alleviates the problem.

Months ago, a refurbished Dell PE 2800 repeatedly threw errors when running a large import job. The internal RAID 10 vols would simply go offline. Replacing the PERC (poweredge raid controller) resolved the issue.

At a client site, a Dell PE 6350 under load would occassionally lose all connectivity with its pair of direct attached SCSI RAID PV 220S units, across a pair of perc cards. Fortunately is was only the test system and not production and a system restart would remount the volumes.

Across several installations, Dell + EMC Clarion units have been stable and solid.

Paul

#/etc/init.d/init.cssd stop
-- play a Sony CD, install a rootkit today

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