PERC 5/i Battery Issue vs. SIMS Server. Eek!

[Gongalong]

Hi folks,

 

We've got a Dell PowerEdge 2950 server which has SIMS installed on it. At a guestimate the server is around 5 years old.

 

The PERC 5/i Integrated storage controller has been showing an alert since June re. its battery level, and in mid-November the battery failed. This has disabled write caching, although nobody has noticed any SIMS performance problems.

 

The bigger issue is that power at the school is being turned off next week, and the plan had been to shutdown all the servers.

 

The concern is that this battery is critical to the operation of the storage card e.g. retaining RAID settings, although I can't find anything via Google that suggests this.

 

(I'm going to ring Dell anyway, to see if we can still get a battery and/or whether they know for sure (if they'll take the call for a 5 year old server) as this server has to limp along until the Spring half term when it will be upgraded)

 

But does anybody here know whether the server will start-up again from a shut down without this battery?

 

TIA

[plexer]

The battery is there to use the built-in memory to store unwritten writes until the power is restored which is why write-caching is disabled other than that you won't have a problem as long as you gracefully shutdown the server.

 

Ben

[plexer]

To replace the battery I would have thought you'd need to power it down anyway.

 

Ben

[Gongalong]

I checked with Dell, and they confirmed that also. So powering off shouldn't cause an issue.

 

£210 inc. VAT to replace it, but we'll risk limping along with until Spring half term.