Good maintenance practices are a must if you want maximize your DELLEMC Isilon’s uptime. There are other benefits to routine maintenance besides the obvious benefit of uptime: it can offer performance advantages.
In this post, we are giving you some simple steps to help maintain the integrity and speed of your EMC Isilon clusters.
4 Basic Maintenance Procedures:
- Inspect the physical environment. Monitor temperature, humidity, and power distribution unit (PDU) statistics in the area where your Isilons are kept, and ensure they match the equipment’s thresholds. Many IT departments fail to specify a policy or procedure for returning these variances back to an acceptable range. Have a firm plan in place for dealing with alarms and variances in these readings.
- Check your cluster’s capacity. Most storage/server admins realize that capacity is a hard ceiling. Going over is not an option. The easiest way is to accomplish this is to check the dashboard in the OneFS web GUI.
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- Managing Data: A subpoint to review data protection, is managing that data. Delete anything too old or unnecessary to free up valuable space.
- Add Nodes: Refurbished nodes can be bought for pennies on the dollar when compared to DellEMC pricing. Our tier 4 engineers can assist adding the nodes to your current cluster, or setting up a second cluster for you.
- Review the status of data protection jobs. If you are using SnapshotIQ for replication or backups, it’s important to check the reports in the OneFS GUI or the log files verify that your data is protected. Discovering failed jobs in real time is key to addressing the cause before it is too late, and you need to switch to data recovery mode.
- Get up to date. If your systems are still under DellEMC factory maintenance, check for the latest clustering software and hardware firmware. You’ll always want to be aware of what maintenance releases (MRs) and firmware updates are available. You can also check the Current Isilon Software Releases document for a list of recommended updates for your system.
Conclusion
These best practices will keep your Isilon systems up and performing at their best. If this all sounds like a lot to do, that is because it is a lot to do, in addition to daily tasks your job requires.
Hiring third party maintenance like SPECTRA can save you hours every week of system management, troubleshooting and routine maintenance task work. Our customers also save between 40 and 80% off DellEMC Isilon maintenance.
To learn more about how we can save you time and money, please visit our EMC maintenance page:
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