XGS SSD Firmware - others also having issues HA nodes not coming up?

LHerzog, 

If you already waited 25 mins, you can power cycle the device now, no need to wait until tomorrow. 

Yes in some cases a power cycle is required, which was why we put it in the notice & KBA so customers are prepared for it. 

bobbylam said:

If you already waited 25 mins, you can power cycle the device now, no need to wait until tomorrow. 

First thing I would say is be careful about the timing. We had one of these and the XGS116 took 25 minutes to come back up after re-powering.

On a more general point, yes I read the the KBA in detail and was aware of the "rare cases" clause! When I read that, and look at the four sites that would be affected, I think about what we would do if the worst happened, but don't expect it with only four units to upgrade.

As it happened, after upgrading the units overnight, waiting for a successful recovery before starting the next one, the last unit failed to come back up. Having done this in the middle of the night, I wasn't best pleased to find out I would have to get up early (they start at 07:00) to talk them through re-powering the XGS. It was doubly unfortunate that unknown to me they had all the directors on site for a board meeting and as their servers are isolated from the workstations via the XGS, nothing was working.

Anyway, having had my whinge, I do wonder if the instances of this are as "rare" as the KBA describes. I know my results are not statistically significant as the sample size is small but I hope someone is considering whether "rare" was the correct adjective to use in the KBA. The fact that this was even mentioned in the KBA makes me suspect that they had enough instances of it in testing to mention it at all. LHerzog 's experience with two identical units, also makes me suspect that the firmware update process is not as reliable as suggested in the KBA.

I understand the need for this update and it was good that the KBA explained how to recover from the update if it went wrong but if there was a more realistic description of the risk level, we would have gone about this a different way.

bobbylam said:

If you already waited 25 mins, you can power cycle the device now, no need to wait until tomorrow. 

First thing I would say is be careful about the timing. We had one of these and the XGS116 took 25 minutes to come back up after re-powering.

On a more general point, yes I read the the KBA in detail and was aware of the "rare cases" clause! When I read that, and look at the four sites that would be affected, I think about what we would do if the worst happened, but don't expect it with only four units to upgrade.

As it happened, after upgrading the units overnight, waiting for a successful recovery before starting the next one, the last unit failed to come back up. Having done this in the middle of the night, I wasn't best pleased to find out I would have to get up early (they start at 07:00) to talk them through re-powering the XGS. It was doubly unfortunate that unknown to me they had all the directors on site for a board meeting and as their servers are isolated from the workstations via the XGS, nothing was working.

Anyway, having had my whinge, I do wonder if the instances of this are as "rare" as the KBA describes. I know my results are not statistically significant as the sample size is small but I hope someone is considering whether "rare" was the correct adjective to use in the KBA. The fact that this was even mentioned in the KBA makes me suspect that they had enough instances of it in testing to mention it at all. LHerzog 's experience with two identical units, also makes me suspect that the firmware update process is not as reliable as suggested in the KBA.

I understand the need for this update and it was good that the KBA explained how to recover from the update if it went wrong but if there was a more realistic description of the risk level, we would have gone about this a different way.

Having just been dumped with a list of 230 units that need this manual process if it's as bad as this I'm going to throw myself down some stairs. Having said that we've had Sophos GES manually applying the patch and there hasn't been any issues (though that's a small sample size of 10+ units).