If you look after storage arrays you may have come to a situation like this.
You have a disk array, you want to turn it off (for whatever reason, age, replacement, it smells of old cheddar.. whatever). Alas there is some customer still using a portion of it, you now need to wait for them to leave before you can decommision it.
Well I have had an idea to ‘help’ them in their exodus from the shelf. Quite simply you enact storage Jenga. How does this work? easy, every day/couple of days/ weeks (depending on your desired timescale/array size), you send a member of staff to site, once on site, that member of staff removes, physically a single disk from the array and leaves. Now the customer has a chance of surviving this, depending on your configuration and hot spares, but each disk removed increases their odds of goodbye
I imagine this will work with maximum excitement with RAID 10 arrays with a couple of hot spares, possibly pulling a disk JUST before the time it takes to rebuild the hotspare
Wonder if management will let me try it some time? Hmmmmm


