Storage Jenga

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 😀

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