Re: Cache battery and Raid Controller Design WAS: Re: Rép. : Question of a Newbie to POWER Systems

Remember also that your system will first send you a message when the battery is 90 days from being called out as too old. (SRC XXXX8009). In those 90 days you should replace the battery. If you wait for the full 90 then you get the 8008 SRC which says, and I quote, sorta: "Hey dummy. I gave you 90 days but you didn't pay attention. I have now turned off your RAID cache. Deal with it!"

You can also look in Service Tools at any time to see the remaining days on your cache batteries and plan for their replacement.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

On 3/30/2011 9:00 AM, Bryce Martin wrote:

What you and Jim say makes sense. Its more of IBM making you go from
cache to synchronous when they feel the cache battery might be unreliable
instead of waiting for it to fail and you possibly losing data.

I was going to suggest a way to somehow override the system so that you
could get your performance back while waiting on a replacement, but then I
remembered hearing that you can reset the clock to make the system think
it was replace correct? Because doesn't it just work on some sort of
clock hours??


Thanks
Bryce Martin
Programmer/Analyst I
570-546-4777



Vern Hamberg<vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx>
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Re: Cache battery and Raid Controller Design WAS: Re: Rép. : Question
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Bryce

Interesting question - seems to me that the cache battery is a backup -
it preserves anything in the cache in the event of a power outage. The
system could and probably does use the regular power of the system
during normal operations.

The matter of slowing down when the cache battery's life is running out
- I think this happens for a different reason - if the battery can't
keep data in the cache, then you can't rely on the cache. So writes have
to be done synchronously, not through the cache, because the backup is
not trustworthy. This slows it down.

I've not thought of this at all, so my ideas can be far off base!

Vern

On 3/30/2011 7:32 AM, Bryce Martin wrote:

Jim Said....
"Write cache has a massive impact on I/O performance. The more write
cache the better. Ask anyone who has lost the batteries on the raid
card what happens when write cache goes away. Ugly things happen."

This got me thinking about RAID Card design....

Why the heck isn't the cache batter a backup, not a primary power

source?

If the cache batter goes shouldn't the controller still have enough
electrical input to keep its cache alive? This just seems like poor
design, and a major oversight. Maybe I don't understand hardware design
(that is probably the case), but I'm failing to see what the purpose is

of

the battery vs straight electrical input from the system? I would think
you'd want a cache battery in the case of a hardware failure so you

don't

lose data, but I would think that it should be a backup source....

Thanks
Bryce Martin
Programmer/Analyst I
570-546-4777
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