I’ve worked with Nimble Storage devices for over 2 years now, they constantly amaze me, but one of the thing I’ve yet to see in the field is an actual failure. So the other morning at 3am, I received an email about a failed disk, so I thought I’d walk those through the process of what happens.

After all, if you going to buy a new storage device, you want to know exactly how it acts in a failure scenario, wouldn’t you?

Failure Alert – Infosight and Autosupport at its best

So three things happened almost instantaneously when the failure happened;

• Email alert sent to the recipients configured on the Nimble Storage Array
• Failure information sent to Nimble Storage’s Infosight website
• A support case was automatically opened with all the necessary details

Below I’ve also included screenshots of the array status page, and the event logs on the Nimble Storage device as well, where you will see normal operations such as snapshots continued.

So all I had to do in the morning was confirm the address where the parts are to be sent, and if an engineer was needed.

Note: with the service offerings from Nimble, you can opt, in the times of hardware failure, to have the replacements sent out as soon as it hits Infosight, or to confirm the delivery of parts before they are sent. For this environment, we chose the latter.

So how do you resolve the issue?

Continue reading What happens when a Nimble Storage disk drive fails? →