VTrak Family Discussions

Promise VTRAK

2018-06-13T11:54:21.1770000

HI,

Does anyone have any technical details on how the RAID on the VTRAK m500 is arranged? We had a multiple drive failure and even after sending the drives for data recovery my arrays do not come online. I have 14x1TB drives in single Disk Array with 7 logical RAID 5 arrays across them. I am now imaging all 14 drives in hopes that i can build the array virtually with R-Studio to recover the data. The data on the logicals is either NTFS or VMFSData recovery firms have quoted approx $20,000 - $40,000 to recover this system and i need to make some attempts to get it done cost effectively first.After the failed drive recovery i should be OK to bring up the array in critical with only 1 drive dead but its not co-operating.Any help is appreciated on how i can rebuild this in Rstudio.

Please help.

I did not find the right solution from the internet.

References:

https://forum.r-tt.com/viewtopic.php?t=4198

Smart Gadget Video

Thanks!

XSAN doesn't work.

2018-05-17T04:13:12.0600000

My XSAN doesn't work. I have a xserve with OS X 10.10.3. There is a problem in Xsan. My XSan vollume is offline and does not see my volume. How can I repair my volume? Please help us.

XSAN doesn't work.

2018-05-17T04:14:57.5200000

My XSAN doesn't work. I have a xserve with OS X 10.10.3. There is a problem in Xsan. My XSan vollume is offline and does not see my volume. How can I repair my volume? Please help us.

I can't access web manage vtrak m610i

2018-01-17T15:16:56.6930000

Hello and thanks in advance for your help.

I have two Vtrak m610i in my company. One of them is working fine, but the other one, lose the web administration.

I try to connect via telnet, but is not allowed.

How could I repair this issue?

Thanks (and sorry, I must improve my english)

How I successfully Resurrected two Vtrak arrays 25 TB each

2017-02-02T06:17:25.4830000

Dear Vtrak owners!

I hope my solution will helpful for any Vtrak system and sometimes will save your nerves. In 2010 we bought very expensive configuration which is called in manual as «no single point of failure» (figure 14, page 26): E610F with two controllers, two servers, two FC switches with 2TB SATA disks (RAID 6) and AAMUXes. In 2013 we added J610SD JBOD with two controllers and 2TB disks. But e610Fd itself is single point of failure: when in 2017 we added second J610SD, created and deleted array on it (for test reason), subsystem hanged. After restart all disks except one were UNCOFIGURED, and it showed only one array with INCOMPLETE status. Promise's support said that data is gone and that I should restore backup of 50tb! Of course we cannot store 50tb of backup. Than I on my own risk accepted incomplete array, deleted it, and created it again with old parameters (order of disks, stripe size, sector size, capacity), than start server. Windows 2008 R2 saw all our files in excellent condition (chkdsk passed test with no errors)! Than I recreated with old parameters the second lost array - windows saw it too. Futhermore I tried few times to create array, copy some files on it, and then delete it and create again - files were seen again.

Support said that my solution is very specific for adding article to knowledge base, but it works. If sometimes you lose your array and see your disks as unconfigured, there is a large chance of resurrection.

vtrak x30 hard drive upgrade questions

2016-07-11T16:28:31.3500000

Is there a list of recommened of hard drives for use in the x30 units? Thinking of putting 4TB drives into one of our spare units for backup data. Also is there any specific formatting that needs to be done before installing drives into the unit?

stripe size guidelines and performance

2016-04-06T08:28:34.4370000

I'm wondering if there are any updated guidelines or performance analysis using modern systems with respect to the Stripe Size settings for logical drives. The product manuals for the E-class series, which is copyrighted 2011 so it's possible that they haven't been updated in 5 years, includes the following text:

If you do not know the cache buffer or fixed data block sizes, choose 64 KB as your Stripe Size. Generally speaking: Email, POS, and web servers prefer smaller stripe sizes. Video and database applications prefer larger stripe sizes.

Modern disk drives typically have much larger cache buffers than the available options, so this will hardly ever be a factor. And the second part of this conflicts with conventional wisdom elsewhere on the web: many guides recommend larger sizes for random access (typically email/web servers) and smaller sizes for sequential access (video or large files, although fixed block sizes might be the overriding factor). The idea being that random access will often hit one drive at a time so you might as well cache a block of data, versus sequential access which will likely hit all of the drives in sequence so it's better to distribute the I/O and have them operating in parallel.

Does Promise have more specific recommendations based on their particular product design or even better with performance tests or benchmarks? If the 64K size is recommended for typical use cases, I am wondering what the typical use cases are for larger sizes and if anyone has reported performance improvements using them.

In my case, I want to create logical drives where the typical operation is multi-megabyte file sequential access, and I'd like to know if larger stripe size chunks are advantageous or detrimental for this use case.