On 06/25/99 12:50:17 you wrote:
Hi there,
We recently encountered a disk controller failure on one of our data servers (not on our Netapp). The problem was that this failure was not a complete failure of the drive itself, but rather the controller started to die slowly. (i.e. handles some request sometimes and other times who knows?) As a result, this caused our entire filesystem to become corrupt and we lost some of our data as a result. Although this filesystem was mirrored, this did not help us at all, as it was considered a logical error in the filesystem and not a hardware problem.
My question is that should this occur on a Netapps (this may even apply to any other Enterprise server) would it cause the entire filesystem to go corrupt and cause partial or complete data loss as in this case?
I would have to say yes, it's *possible*, but the controller would have to fail in a very odd way; not simply not responding the some requests (that would be caught), but executing some and not others (but claiming it did) or misordering commands or something like that. I would think this kind of error would be very rare. Perhaps the controller you had is particularly prone to those sorts of errors; one advantage of Netapp is you're using controllers they themselves have partially designed and tested.
Bruce