Sun Storage 7000 Power Protection Options

[RobFuller]

I have a question for Phil or Andy with regards to power protection. The 7110 SAN is being powered though a UPS and direct mains, the question I have is in the event of power outage the SAN will have a sudden power loss. The servers accessing the disks should have powered down before this happens so disk access will be nonexistent but is this good for the SAN? Should an agent be loaded onto the SAN to do a graceful shutdown? I currently have APC UPS's with the network management card and the switch protected but the UPS also! Any advice or guides much appreciated.

Thanks,
Rob

[Butuz]

Good question. I too have APC UPSs with network card. I was under the assumption that the SUN SAN would automatically detect the UPS in the same way Windows does?

Butuz

[RobFuller]

Automatic detection? I had to load the agent on mine!

[Duke]

I guess it depends on whether Solaris supports the APC hardware, and vice-versa. I doubt it would detect it automatically but I may be wrong. As we're looking at new server room deployments I'd also be interested in this as it could well affect what UPS I buy!

[pete]

apcupsd does work on OpenSolaris, though you may need to build it yourself.

Disclaimer: this may be horribly unsupported.

[Butuz]

Automatic detection? I had to load the agent on mine!

Sorry - "automatically detect" was the wrong thing to say - what I meant was "automatically support" like Windows does.

I.e "Control Panel > Power Options > UPS" select com port and job done.

Butuz

[linescanner]

apcupsd does work on OpenSolaris, though you may need to build it yourself.

Disclaimer: this may be horribly unsupported.

I think horribly unsupported may be correct. I will pass this on to Phil, he has access to better back end resource than I do.

[pete]

I think horribly unsupported may be correct. I will pass this on to Phil, he has access to better back end resource than I do.

Heh, yeah - I thought that would be the case. It does build cleanly on a standard OpenSolaris box and works on a couple of APC 500 and 650s at home.

[Hebdenlad]

Heh, yeah - I thought that would be the case. It does build cleanly on a standard OpenSolaris box and works on a couple of APC 500 and 650s at home.

All,

I've been asked the UPS question on here and have asked my colleagues about this.

you have to remember that the S7000 is an appliance so adding software to it is a none starter. Having said that we have ILOM on the box Managing Sun Systems - Sun Integrated Lights Out Manager (ILOM)) so you can be notified (as we will via the phone home capability) on events that happen on the box.

I have recevied a reply from one of my European colleagues that addresses this using the Workflow capability that is a key feature of the 2009.Q2 update. His words are below:

"I would suggest you basically script from a host connected to the same ups a shutdown script that would SSH to the 7000 and execute the following command:

ssh root@<7000name> << EOF
confirm maintenance system poweroff
EOF

This would solve your problem. You would need to have prepared ssh keys first."

Also from another of my colleagues the following:

"Hi Phil

Because the underlying FS is ZFS it can survive a power failure cleanly, any sync writes will be in the on disk logs (HDD, in the case of a 7110) and so can be recovered.

Cheers
Tim"

I hope this helps answer some of the questions and address the concerns you have.

Warmest regards,

Phil

[RobFuller]

Just an update if anyone is interested, I have done a script like Phil said but slightly differently using the Lights Out Management on the SUN box.

I downloaded the ipmi tool and then using a standard bat file to run on power outage events:

ipmitool -H IP -v -I lanplus -U root -P password power soft