Re: Disk Failure -- MIDRANGE-L

I just thought I'd post this for people who didn't get it yesterday. This is
from the July 9 email from Midrange Computing.
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iSeries and AS/400 Shops Report Disk Crashes

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

A number of iSeries and AS/400 customers have, in the past
few weeks, sent me emails saying that they have been
experiencing abnormally high failure rates for disk drives.
IBM's disk drives are arguably the best and most reliable
ones on the market, and the people at Rochester have a wise
tradition of being conservative when adopting new hardware
technologies. Disk crashes--particularly those that result
in the loss of data or necessitate the rebuilding of a
system from scratch--are the things that give MIS managers
nightmares. Apparently, a number of OS/400 shops have been
having such nightmares, sources at IBM have confirmed.
Though I have not been able to ascertain the exact nature
of the disk crash problem to my satisfaction and have not
been able to talk to what I think would be a representative
number of OS/400 customers, it is nonetheless important to
let you know as much as I do, so you can protect your
systems as much as possible.

IBM says it is aware that some OS/400 shops have been
experiencing problems with its 10K RPM disk drives. IBM has
not, and will not, come out and say definitively if there
is a hardware problem with these disks--such as the
"stiction" problem that affected a number of disk drives in
the 1990s, which caused disk heads to stick to disk
platters--or if the problem has more to do with the
electronics governing the control of the disk drive and its
interface to the AS/400 or iSeries server. IBM sources say
further that under the warranty conditions for the AS/400
and iSeries machine, IBM works with customers on an
individual basis to replace drives when necessary. My
source at IBM said further that a limited number of
customers have experienced disk failure rates that are high;
that source would not elaborate on the kinds of failure
rates that customers are experiencing. An iSeries shop that
emailed me about this problem a week ago said that it had
several hundred feature 6717 disks (8.58 GB, 10K RPM units),
and had seen 10 of them fail in the past month. Another
shop told me that it had acquired a new Model 830 server and
had experienced an "extremely high" failure rate on the
feature 6717 disks. Another source was installing a new
machine last week and a feature 6717 disk had failed, and
that shop didn't think anything of it until it heard about
a colleague that had two disks fail out of a single machine.

To read the rest of this story, go to
http://www.midrangecomputing.com/mmu/article.cfm?id=882#more


Chris Rehm
javadisciple@earthlink.net
If you believe that the best technology wins the
marketplace, you haven't been paying attention.


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