Yesterday, when Mirrored Disk/iX suddenly informed the console that 8 of our
disks were no longer being mirrored, we discovered that *BOTH* of the
redundant dual power supplies in one of our HASS disk enclosures had gone bad
(i.e. amber LEDs instead of green).

After placing a hardware support call and contacting our CE, we cycled the
power on the HASS and both power supplies came up green.  After a couple of
minutes, one of the power supplies failed again.  With the other power supply
still functional, we began the mirror re-synch process.  About 30 minutes
later, the remaining power supply failed too.  The HASS now sits offline,
awaiting new power supplies to be installed this evening.

Our CE told me the power supplies had been "revised" since we purchased our
HASS units, but he didn't have the details about why the change was made.  Does
anybody on HP3000-L have the details?  I am concerned because while we have
one HASS mirrored against a second HASS (and thus a failure of either of these
units in part or in whole won't crash the system), we have a third HASS where
the left half is mirrored against the right half (loss of this entire unit
*will* crash the system).  I wonder if I should ask preemptively for new
power supplies for this third HASS.

We have no way of knowing if both power supplies actually failed at the same
time.  I assume that if one power supply fails, the other takes over
automatically and without any console messages, and as long as the system is
functional and users aren't complaining, I doubt that our computer room
operators pay much attention to the cabinet LEDs.  An enhancement to log a
console message (similar to the way Mirrored Disk logs a console *reply*) in
the event of a single HASS power supply failure would be very handy, especially
for remote unattended machines.
--
Mark Bixby                      E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Coast Community College Dist.   Web: http://www.cccd.edu/~markb/
District Information Services   1370 Adams Ave, Costa Mesa, CA, USA 92626-5429
Technical Support               +1 714 438-4647
"You can tune a file system, but you can't tune a fish." - tunefs(1M)