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

Rather than reporting a problem, an email is sent to IBM that describes your
system hardware and critical configuration information. Object names and other
information, such as IP addresses, are not sent. The inventory email is sent on a
regular basis. Based on the information that is received, IBM can inform you if the
hardware or software that you are using requires an upgrade because of a known
issue.

Back up your data

Back up your system configuration data and volume 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 is susceptible to failures in your host application or your
Storwize V7000 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.

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 Storwize V7000 helps 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.
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 alert 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
Chapter 2. Best practices for troubleshooting
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