[gpfsug-discuss] mmchdisk suspend / stop

[Jonathan Buzzard]

On Fri, 2018-02-09 at 15:07 +0000, Buterbaugh, Kevin L wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> Since several people have made this same suggestion, let me respond
> to that.  We did ask the vendor - twice - to do that.  Their response
> boils down to, “No, the older version has bugs and we won’t send you
> a controller with firmware that we know has bugs in it.”
> 
> We have not had a full cluster downtime since the summer of 2016 -
> and then it was only a one day downtime to allow the cleaning of our
> core network switches after an electrical fire in our data center!
>  So the firmware on not only our storage arrays, but our SAN switches
> as well, it a bit out of date, shall we say…
> 
> That is an issue we need to address internally … our users love us
> not having regularly scheduled downtimes quarterly, yearly, or
> whatever, but there is a cost to doing business that way...
> 

What sort of storage arrays are you using that don't allow you to do a
live update of the controller firmware? Heck these days even cheapy
Dell MD3 series storage arrays allow you to do live drive firmware
updates.

Similarly with SAN switches surely you have separate A/B fabrics and
can upgrade them one at a time live.

In a properly designed system one should not need to schedule downtime
for firmware updates. He says as he plans a firmware update on his
routers for next Tuesday morning, with no scheduled downtime and no
interruption to service.

JAB.

-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                         Tel: +44141-5483420
HPC System Administrator, ARCHIE-WeSt.
University of Strathclyde, John Anderson Building, Glasgow. G4 0NG