Quick Update on Nexenta and Super Micro

Just a quick note regarding our Nexenta storage solution. Sunday afternoon a few weeks back (why do these things always happen on weekends) we had a truck knock over a utility pole just down the street from our office and we lost power to the building. Our server room contains one badly underpowered UPS with no generator backup so it wasn't long before everything in the room was shut down. I cancelled my plans, headed into the office and waited for power to get restored, then proceeded to power everything back up (This is always a nerve wracking time). All went well with one exception - Nexenta reported being unable to see any disks in my array and therefore failed to mount any shares. All our data drives are housed in our Super Micro 836E2-R800B JBOD Chassis. I headed into the server room and the system light was on but no lights on any of the drives.

Rebooting the Nexenta head unit did not resolve the issue. After a 20 minutes of high anxiety I noticed the power supplies in the 836E2-R800B were amber. All our other Super Micro boxes have green lights. I powered down Nexenta then unplugged the power, counted to 10 and replugged them in getting a green light on the power supplies. Restarted the Nexenta head unit and everything came back in line. A quick reboot of all our servers using iSCSI luns from the Nexenta restored those drives and we were back on line.

Overall still pleased with our Nexenta system. Still a bit of a learning curve, regretting my decision not to thin provision my DPM luns as that totally defeated any space gains I would have seen from deduplication and compression. I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that Nexenta doesn't get acquired by some big iron shop and killed.

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