Dell PowerVault MD1 Series Optimization Manual - Page 7
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A REFERENCE GUIDE FOR OPTIMIZING DELL™ POWERVAULT™ MD1XXX FAMILY SAS SOLUTION
VER A02
2. Recommended Maintenance for Dell PowerVault MD1xxx Family SAS Solution
Dell strives to provide the best possible customer experience for all of our Enterprise server and
storage products. Proper maintenance of your solution is essential to ensure that the equipment
remains in optimal working condition. Dell recommends the following suggested maintenance
activities.
Keep firmware/drivers/utilities Updated
In general, Dell posts planned maintenance updates for firmware twice a year. To stay current
with the latest updates, customers can subscribe to Dell notification tools. Click the following link
to sign up for technical updates.
http://support.dell.com/support/topics/global.aspx/support/notifications/en/index?c=us&l=en&s
=gen
Enable Background Read Patrol
Background Read Patrol, a function of the RAID controller, is an automatically scheduled
background task that scans and resolves possible physical disk errors that may lead to physical
disk failure and result in data integrity issues. Dell recommends implementing Background Read
Patrol in all configurations.
See section 5 for details.
Schedule and run periodic consistency checks / Background Initialization (BGI)
Consistency checks / BGI are performed by many RAID controllers to verify that all stripes in a
redundant virtual disk are consistent and to automatically correct stripes where inconsistencies are
found. BGI is a consistency check that automatically runs on all redundant arrays. Depending on
workload, Dell recommends that consistency checks should be run manually on the virtual disks at
least once every month to ensure data integrity. Consistency checks and Background Read Patrol
are complementary and both should be used.
See section 5 for details.
Enable Hot Spares
Hot spare functionality provides extra security, availability and redundancy by automatically
replacing a failed disk in a RAID group and allowing the rebuild of the degraded array to begin
immediately. Dell PERC controllers support Hot Spare functionality and it is recommended
whenever possible.
See section 5 for details.
Document your configuration and keep the documentation current
Documenting your configuration facilitates faster and easier recovery should a failure occur. Make
sure to include RAID levels, physical disks included in your virtual disks, firmware, and driver
versions and usage of hot spares in your documentation.
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