Manage Your Spare And Failed Drives; Resolve Alerts In A Timely Manner; Keep Your Software Up To Date; Keep Your Records Up To Date - IBM Storwize V7000 Troubleshooting And Maintenance Manual

Manage your spare and failed drives

Your RAID arrays that are created from drives in the Storwize V7000 system 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

Storwize V7000 reports an alert when there is an issue or a potential issue that requires user attention.
The management GUI helps resolve these problems through the Recommended Actions panel.
Perform the recommended actions as quickly as possible after the problem is reported. Storwize V7000 is
designed to be resilient to most single hardware failures. However, if you operate for any period of time
with a hardware failure, the possibility increases that a second hardware failure can result in some
volume data that is unavailable.
If there are a number of unfixed alerts, fixing any one might become more difficult because of the effects
of the other alerts.

Keep your software up to date

Check for new code releases and update your code on a regular basis.
Check the IBM support website to see if new code releases are available:
Support for Storwize V7000 website at www.ibm.com/storage/support/storwize/v7000
The release notes provide information about new function in a release plus any issues that have been
resolved. Update your code regularly if the release notes indicate an issue that you might be exposed to.

Keep your records up to date

Record the location information for your enclosures
If you have only one system, it is relatively easy to identify the enclosures that make up the system.
Identification becomes more difficult when you have multiple systems in your data center and multiple
systems in the same rack.
The enclosure identifier that is displayed on the front of the display is unique within a system. However,
the identifiers can be repeated between different systems. Do not rely solely on this identifier.
For each system, record the location of the control enclosure and the location of any expansion
enclosures. It is useful to label the enclosures themselves with the system name and the management IP
addresses.

Subscribe to support notifications

Subscribe to support notifications so that you are aware of best practices and issues that might affect your
system.
19
Chapter 2. Best practices for troubleshooting