I should mention one other "annoying" behavior - when a disk drops from
the filer, is not marked as "failed" and no autosupport is issued. So,
you can have a missing disk that the filer will spare out, using
whatever spare(s) you have provided. However, unless you monitor for
this condition by comparing disks total counts to what should be there,
its possible to have a failure, use your spare, not replace the spare
and get a second failure. This condition does exist under 6.1R1 - it
may be fixed in later ONTap revs. In this scenario, having 2 or more
spares is very good indeed.
-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Yergeau [mailto:yergeau@yergeau.net]
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2002 2:26 PM
To: Steve Evans; toasters(a)mathworks.com
Subject: Re: # of volumes
Spares not only cross shelves they even cross FCAL adapters if
you have shelves on different FCAL HBAs.
A single volume would have to lose two disks simultaneously or
two disks after the first rebult in order to lose data with only one
spare.
If it lost one disk, then shortly thereafter another disk, then
having a second spare would not help as the first one would still be
rebuilding and you'd lose the volume.
If you lose one disk, rebuild, and lose another disk, you're
still intact but in degraded mode and vulnerable. Having a second spare
would be helpful. But the odds of losing two disks, the second one
after the first one rebuilt but before NetApp got you a replacement 4
hrs or the next day, seems low.
If you have two spares per filer like Sam mentioned, you're
covered anyway since hot spares are global to the entire filer.
Gosh this sounds convoluted! :-)
MD
----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Evans <mailto:sevans@foundation.sdsu.edu>
To: Tom Yergeau <mailto:yergeau@yergeau.net>
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2002 4:35 PM
Subject: RE: # of volumes
Well if you have a 14 disk shelf, and two volumes, then
each volume could have a disk fail on top of one more that the spare
would cover. But yeah, if your doing a 1:13 ratio then it doesn't
matter anyways because I don't believe spares can cross shelfs.
Steve Evans
Computing Services
(619) 594-0653