CX3 vault drives

If you have a running system with a faulted vault drive, then you can replace it with a 'normal' drive of similar type (FC if it is FC, SATA if it is SATA, and equal or larger size), and the vault data will rebuild from the remaining disks.  You can 'borrow' an unused disk from elsewhere in the array and replace the failed drive with it.

If you have a non-running system with two or more failed vault drives, then my best suggestion is to look for a used equipment seller, I'd probably start with ebay, and look for a commercial seller rather than an individual.  You can probably find a bare-bones CX system for ~$1000 or less.  You can also find spare disks in this same manner at quite reasonable prices.  I would however suggest getting enough now/soon to keep you going for the expected lifetime of the array...which you shouldn't expect to be all that much longer...

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glen

Thanks, im looking for a complete set of valut drives fo the array, as the reason it's failed is the vault drives were mixed-up during a move and mis-placed. I don't have any of them anymore. The drives I thought were the vault drives were not, so the array does not boot.

Everything was de-racked for a move, and the drives were boxed separately from the DAE's (due to weight), so although I located DAE0, I couldn't tell which drives were the vault ones. Given that we have a large number of drives, the permutations make it next to impossible to somehow find the correct drives.

All the data had been moved to new VNX arrays, so there's nothing lost except the ability to use the array. We had intended to move the CX3 to our lab environment and use it as a spare array but without a complete set of vault drives that seems pretty much out now.

No, the array was decommissioned when it was repaced with a VNX. Our goal was to have the datacenter ship the CX3 back to our office for use as a lab system, and it was just powered offf, de-rcked and shippped. Due to weight, the datacenter removed the disks from the DAE's prior to packing, and no record of what disks came from which DAEs was kept. When we received the boxes, it was just a collection of disks with no way to determine what came from where.

This was just a logistical issue rather than a array issue. I was hoping there was a way to replace or rebuild the vault drives.

Did you by chance have a set of spcollects from before the move? In the logs there is a list of disks with serial numbers for each DAE and slot in the DAE (see example below). If you have these logs, you could locate the disks for each slot by serial number.

         Raid          Drive                                                                                                            Cur   Max

Disk    Group Capacity Intfc   Vendor     Drive Type     Serial Number    Part Number  TLA Number    Firmware   State       Replacing Speed Speed

0.0.0     150     73GB FC      HITACHI    Viper-A' 4Gb   J5Y0K6LK         118032530    005048700     R600       Unbound     --            4     4

0.0.1     150     73GB FC      HITACHI    Viper-A' 4Gb   J5Y1D8GP         118032530    005048700     R600       Unbound     --            4     4

0.0.2     150     73GB FC      HITACHI    Viper-A' 4Gb   J5Y1802P         118032530    005048700     R600       Unbound     --            4     4

0.0.3     150     73GB FC      HITACHI    Viper-A' 4Gb   J5Y3Y89P         118032530    005048700     R600       Unbound     --            4     4

0.0.4     150     73GB FC      HITACHI    Viper-A' 4Gb   J5Y3ZYXP         118032530    005048700     R600       Unbound     --            4     4

In the spcollects (the zip files that end in ...data.zip - one for SPA and one for SPB) you will other zip files - in the one that ends in ...sus.zip you can file a file called SPx_cfg_info.txt. In those files (SPA and SPB are identical for the disks) you can find a listing of each disk - similar to below - this is the first vault disk - Bus 0 Enclosure 0 Disk 0 - there you can find the serial number:

Bus 0 Enclosure 0  Disk 0

Vendor Id:               HITACHI

Product Id:              HUS151P7 CLAR72

Product Revision:        R600

Lun:                     Unbound

Type:                    N/A

State:                   Unbound

Hot Spare:               NO

Prct Rebuilt:            Unbound

Prct Bound:              Unbound

Serial Number:           J5Y0K6LK   <-------

You should use this to place every disk (not just the vault disks) in the correct slots - as each disk in the CX3 needs to be placed in the slot that it was assigned originally (before you moved the system).

glen

I think there used to be a part number for the CX3 vault drives - I'll look around and see if I can dig it up.

glen

What model CX3 do you have? Do you know what the disk size was originally?

glen

The array has not had support for years. There have been no supoport calls or any sp-collects run in a very long time, and the vault drives have been replaced as disks failed over time anyhow. There is 0-chance of any sp-collect data which is current.

To restate Glen's excellent advice:  If you had someone who was placing the service calls for the unit, or a desktop/server that was used for its management, there is a decent chance that there exists an SPCollect for it somewhere on disk, or perhaps as an email attachment. 

Any one from that unit, from any time, would do.  The file names stick out, and it would be easy to identify based on the APM00... serial number.

glen

The prices im seeing for this part number are, in-fact, more than buying a used/working CX3-20 array...

Bummer.

It's a CX3-20c with 8 DAEs. We got the CX3 used. At the time, it had 146Gb 2Gb vault drives. Over the years, we upgraded it to 300Gb 4Gb 15k drives. The entire array was pushed to 4Gb loops. Almost all the drives are 300Gb 4Gb 15k.