DMX reliability

[steveyUK]

We recently experienced an unscheduled power down. When our DMX's were powered back up we had multiple failures within the box.
I understood that becuase of the battery backup a power outage should have no effect on the boxes as it goes into an orderly shutdown routine.
I'd be interested to hear of anyone elses experiences and comments on the reliability of these boxes and symm's as in general.
Thanks,
Steve

 

[laudao]

Hi Steveuk,

no. normaly the incl. Battery holds the Symm for 3 Mins. to write down the Cache and spin down all drives.
I think your Battery is broken, its happend several Times in the last years.
Greetz, Olli.

 

[Jackmans]

SteveUK,

I have seen an issue with the DMX800 which had a broken SAF board (used to attach the DMX to a host).
With this board broken, the DMX created wrong CRC checks on the data that came in through this channel and put these CRC's in cache memory with the data.
When offloading cache memory to disks the system checks CRC again, and thought that the cached data was corrupted.
This resulted in suspending all disks, including all disks in the remote (SRDF) DMX box. So customer could not access any data at all, both local and remote.
Result was that EMC had to correct the cache data and replace the SAF director board. It seems that there definitely is a single point of failure in the DMX itself.