Back Up Your Data; Manage Your Spare And Failed Drives; Resolve Alerts In A Timely Manner - IBM Storwize V7000 Unified Problem Determination Manual

If your system is within warranty, or you have a hardware maintenance agreement,
configure your system to send email events to IBM if an issue that requires
hardware replacement is detected. This mechanism is called Call Home. When this
event is received, IBM automatically opens a problem report, and if appropriate,
contacts you to verify if replacement parts are required.
If you set up Call Home to IBM, ensure that the contact details that you configure
are correct and kept up to date as personnel change.

Back up your data

Back up your system configuration data, volume data, and file systems.
The file modules back up their configuration after each configuration change.
Download the backup files regularly to your management workstation to protect
the data.
The storage system backs up your control enclosure configuration data to a file
every day. This data is replicated on each control node canister in the system.
Download this file regularly to your management workstation to protect the data.
This file must be used if there is a serious failure that requires you to restore your
system configuration. It is important to back up this file after modifying your
system configuration.
Your volume data or files in the file systems are susceptible to failures in your host
application or your Storwize V7000 Unified system. Follow a backup and archive
policy that is appropriate to the data that you have for storing the volume data on
a different system or the files on a different system.

Manage your spare and failed drives

Your RAID arrays that are created from drives consist of drives that are active
members and drives that are spares.
The spare drives are used automatically if a member drive fails. If you have
sufficient spare drives, you do not have to replace them immediately when they
fail. However, monitoring the number, size, and technology of your spare drives,
ensures that you have sufficient drives for your requirements. Ensure that there are
sufficient spare drives available so that your RAID arrays are always online.

Resolve alerts in a timely manner

Your system reports an alert when there is an issue or a potential issue that
requires user attention.
The management GUI provides the capability to review these issues from the
Events panel.
For file module issues, use the Storwize V7000 Unified information center to look
up the events and perform the actions listed for the events.
For Storwize V7000 issues, resolve these problems through the Recommended
actions only option from the Events panel.
Perform the recommended actions as quickly as possible after the problem is
reported. Your system is designed to be resilient to most single hardware failures.
Chapter 2. Best practices for troubleshooting
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