Storage System Maintenance – NCSA – Getting storage maintenance windows is very CRITICAL task for Storage Administrators. Most of the firmware updates can be applied on the fly does not required any down time.

Some times we have to shutdown / bring down the storage controllers because of power outage, yet that time what we have to check in-order shutdown and bring  them back without any issues.

• Migrate workloads off storage (disconnect all applications)
• Verify Cluster status before shutdown
• Physical inspection (verify connectivity)
• Hard-disk scan (Disk shelf check)
• Event-log alerts or trends 

Storage System Maintenance – NCSA

Whenever a disk failed then we have to replace a failed disk but how we will know that there is an disk failed in Filer, We have to enable the autosupport feature and configure it correctly then we will get an alert this alert will also automatically send to Netapp support then Netapp Hardware support team will initiate an ticket then they will immediately ship an NEW drive based on your registered address and contact info. 

How to configure the autosupport See Here

Before they send an HDD to the site we should have at least two spare drives in system as well as two spare drive in our Datacenter. We may now know sometime frequent disks may fail within 4 to 5 hours of time, in that emergency situation we don’t want to loose any production data. We will replace failed drive immediately.

How to Replace an Failed Drive in 7 mode See Guide Here

Actually we can’t shutdown filers but we have to halt them instead. Before halting the Filer / Controller we have to do below steps

1. Stop all the applications Like Databases, Web Applications and all before halting Disk I/O should be zero
2. Terminate CIFS connections / sessions
3. Stop NFS shares 
4. Disable / Stop Snapmirror replication when it is idle
5. Ensure there is no Backup application dependence
6. UnMap all the snapshots / Flexclones  

 

First Power down all the Disk shelf’s 

Halt First node if it in cluster

Next node halt

After completion of halting both the nodes remove the power

Thanks for the read. 

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