Unplanned Outages Avoided

Share this:

Posted in:

Health & Monitoring

Each week VSI clients receive an email report summarizing the findings, trends, and potential issues that are worth noting within their storage environment. The following article discusses the major findings VSI was able to uncover within our clients environments for 2019.

In 2019 we were able to provide business value to our clients including, but not limited to, the following areas.

Unplanned Outages Avoided

Every storage array notifies you when components fail. Since drives can be the most mechanical part of the storage array, this is the component that fails most often. The more drives you have the more likely the chance of failure.  VSI also notifies users when drives fail, but takes it a step further.  VSI checks to ensure you have proper hot spare coverage – at all times.

This past year VSI caught two different types of emergency situations before they arose. The customers “hot spare coverage” was incomplete. VSI notified the customer that the vendor setup was incomplete and there was a failed drive causing hot spare takeover, with no hot spare remaining.

The customer was unaware of these unstable conditions until they received their weekly VSI email report. The customers reaction was:  “ wow, I am glad you let me know. I might have let this condition linger and then if another failure had occurred it would have cost us a lot of money, not to mention the loss of confidence in IT….There’s a difference between a drive failing and one failing causing a hot spare coverage issue!”

With the information to handle this situation in advance, outage was avoided.