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Storage Health and Related Considerations

Dell OpenManage™ Storage Management User's Guide

  Storage Health

  Storage Component Severity

  Storage Properties and Current Activity

  Alerts or Events

  Monitoring Disk Reliability on RAID Controllers

  Using Alarms to Detect Failures

  Using Enclosure Temperature Probes

  Rescan to Update Storage Configuration Changes

  I/O Requirements for Detecting Drive Status Changes

This section describes various methods to determine the status or health of your system's storage components.

Storage Health

The Health subtab displays the current status for the storage components. The Health subtab for the Storage tree view object reflects the status of all lower-level objects. For example, if the storage system has been compromised due to a degraded enclosure, both the enclosure Health subtab and the Storage Health subtab display a yellow exclamation point (!) to indicate a Warning severity. See Storage Component Severity for more information.

A quick way to review the status of all storage components is to select the Storage tree view object and view the Health subtab. You can click the storage components on the Health subtab to display detailed information about the component.

Storage Component Severity

Component status is indicated by the severity. A component with a Warning or Critical/Failure status requires immediate attention to avoid data loss if possible. It may be useful to review the Alert Log for events indicating why a component has a Warning or Critical status. For additional troubleshooting information, see Alert Messages and Troubleshooting.

The component status displayed on this screen reflects the status at a given point in time. If you believe the status has changed and wish to update this screen, select the controller's Information/Configuration tab and execute the Rescan task.

Severity

Component Status

Normal/OK. The component is working as expected.

Warning/Non-critical. A probe or other monitoring device has detected a reading for the component that is above or below the acceptable level. The component may still be functioning, but it could fail. The component may also be functioning in an impaired state. Data loss is possible.

Critical/Failure/Error. The component has either failed or failure is imminent. The component requires immediate attention and may need to be replaced. Data loss may have occurred.

Storage Properties and Current Activity

The Configuration/Information subtab displays information regarding a storage component. These properties include details such as the number of channels on a controller or the Enclosure Management Modules (EMM) firmware version.

The State and Progress properties indicate a component's current activity. For example, an offline array disk displays the Offline status while the Progress property displays how close to completion an operation (such as a rebuild) is.

The following sections describe the properties for each component:

Alerts or Events

Storage activity generates alerts or events that are displayed in the Alert Log. Some alerts indicate normal activity and are displayed for informational purposes only. Other alerts indicate abnormal activity which should be addressed immediately. For more information about alerts and their corrective actions, see Alert Messages.

Monitoring Disk Reliability on RAID Controllers

Storage Management supports Self Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology (S.M.A.R.T.) on array disks that are S.M.A.R.T. enabled.

S.M.A.R.T. performs predictive failure analysis on each disk and sends alerts if a disk failure is predicted. The RAID controllers check array disks for failure predictions and, if found, pass this information to Storage Management. Storage Management immediately displays an alert icon on the disk. Storage Management also sends an alert to the Alert Log and the Windows application log.

Note: When a controller's I/O is paused, you will not receive S.M.A.R.T. alerts.
Note: The PERC 2/SC, 2/DC, 3/SC, 3/DCL, 3/DC, 3/QC, 4/SC, 4/DC, 4e/DC, 4/Di, 4e/Si, 4e/Di, and CERC ATA100/4ch controllers will not report S.M.A.R.T. alerts for unassigned or hot spare drives.

Related information: Replacing an Array Disk Receiving SMART Alerts

Using Alarms to Detect Failures

Some storage components have alarms. When enabled, these alarms alert you when a component fails. See the following sections for more information:

Using Enclosure Temperature Probes

Array disk enclosures have temperature probes that warn you when the enclosure has exceeded an acceptable temperature range. For more information on using temperature probes, see the following:

Rescan to Update Storage Configuration Changes

The Rescan task scans the controller channels to verify the currently connected devices or to recognize new devices that have been added to the channels. When you do a rescan on a controller object, all channels or backplanes attached to the controller are rescanned. Performing a rescan causes the controller to recognize changes in the storage configuration, such as adding or removing array disks from a virtual disk or changing a RAID level. Array disks that are not part of virtual disks are not polled for status changes.

You may want to rescan in the following situations:

If you want to rescan all controllers, then do a Global Rescan. If you want to rescan only the components attached to a particular controller, then do a Rescan Controller.

Related information:

I/O Requirements for Detecting Drive Status Changes

This section applies to PERC 2/SC, 2/DC, 3/SC, 3/DCL, 3/DC, 3/QC, 4/SC, 4/DC, 4e/DC, 4/Di, 4e/Si, 4e/Di, and CERC ATA100/4ch controllers

Because of hardware restrictions, the PERC 2/SC, 2/DC, 3/SC, 3/DCL, 3/DC, 3/QC, 4/SC, 4/DC, 4e/DC, 4/Di, 4e/Si, 4e/Di, and CERC ATA100/4ch controllers will not detect a drive status change until I/O is attempted. For example, when an unconfigured drive is removed, the controller will not detect the change until a manual rescan is done or other I/O operations are attempted. Likewise, displaying a status change of a virtual disk or one of its member array disks requires that you do I/O on the controller on which the virtual disk resides.

Related information:


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