Accusys ExaRAID GUI - Manual (Page 280)

Appendix
B-11
environmental conditions, like bad air conditioning or vibrations, or because
of failures of hardware components, like connectors or cables. When any of
these happens, the data and RAID configurations are gone forever for most
storage systems. With the online array recovery, the firmware can online
recognize and recover the RAID configurations stored on disk drives and get
the data back as long as the disk drives can be running again.
B.10 Vigilant System Monitoring
After a storage system is installed and starts serving the applications, one of
the most important jobs for the administrators is to monitor the system status.
The hardware components in a storage system, like disk drives, fans, or
power supply units, might become unhealthy or even dead, and the
environment might also be out of control. The firmware vigilantly watches
these hardware components and environment, and alerts the
administrators timely. It may also intelligently conduct necessary
countermeasures to recover from the degradation or mitigate the risks.
• Remote monitoring by Web GUI
The web GUI displays the picture of the hardware components of the
storage system, and shows their corresponding status. The administrator can
quickly get the overview of the system status and easily understand what
components need to be serviced. Because the GUI can be remotely
accessed by web browsers, the monitoring can be done virtually anywhere
in the world.
• Non-volatile event logging
To help the administrators to track the history of all state changes, the
firmware records the log of events on the NVRAM of the controller. Because
the logs are recorded on the controller, there is no need of extra software to
keep the records. The logs can also be downloaded to the administrator’s
desktop for further analysis or long-term database, and it can be saved as a
human-readable text file or CSV file for spreadsheet applications.
• Timely event notification
In addition to the audible alarm on the controller to alert the administrators,
the firmware can also send out event notification email and SNMP traps. To
make sure that the events are delivered to the recipients, redundant servers
are used to pass the events. The administrator can also manually generate
test events to see how events are logged and alerts are sent.
• Selective logging and notification
The firmware records a wide range of events, from informative events, like
user login or management operations to critical events, like power supply
unit failure or RAID crash. To help find specific events in the log, the events
are classified into different severity levels and types. The administrator can
choose the severity levels of events to be recorded, and different event
recipients can also be notified of events of different severity level.