NetApp AutoSupport - Call Your Parents!

First-time NetApps are sometimes struck by the appearance of a “man with a thick bag on a belt,” a courier from UPS, who brought a box with a new hard disk drive to replace a malfunctioning system in their system in the evening, after work, on Monday morning, about the fact that the admins sometimes they themselves did not know either.
The admins did not know, and the NetApp support department had already learned from the Autosupport system message, processed the application, analyzed the situation, and sent the hard disk for replacement.


Autosupport is a special service of NetApp Data ONTAP's own OS that runs inside these storage systems.
This service, in case of detection of abnormal events, and also weekly in the case of normal operation, collects from the working storage system and sends service diagnostics and logs to the service center. Based on the analysis of these logs, the service department sees the situation, takes action, sending the spare part from the replacement warehouse to a faulty one, and can also take proactive and corrective actions, and at advanced support levels, also gives recommendations on how to optimally configure the system or develops procedures, such as data migration. or performance optimization.
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Autosupport sends these logs in the form of a regular plaintext e-mail, with attached zip-files (logs are also in plaintext), which is very convenient, for example, if necessary, to control this shipment with enterprise-wide monitoring and security tools, since It is trivial to configure work through local SMTP relay with full control. (It is also possible to send logs via http or https).



I remember how much torment was with the same call home service of one of the “big” systems [of another vendor], which strived to regularly call the built-in modem (!) Via dial-up (!!) from Komsomolsk-on-Amur to Holland (!! !), and at the same time sent there, from a secret military enterprise, to the territory of a NATO member country, something outwardly completely binary. The fact that the secretaries of the plant with * or bricks and beaten off to the admin brain is a very delicate description of the situation. :)

Of course, you can (need it!) Also configure the autosupport letter to also arrive to the administrator on duty, or to the corporate alert system (and, for example, sending a notification message to the SMS on duty) in order to timely learn about events in the life of the repository.

If even such sending of Autosupport messages to NetApp is impossible (this happens when the activity switch in the company's security service is set to “paranoid”), then the system administrators will have to manually send logs to support (this is also a supported feature). Please note that in this case the terms of service are calculated not from the moment of failure of the details, but from the moment of notifying the service with such a letter, with all the necessary data, the responsibility for efficiency in this case falls to the administrative service of the client.

All NetApp systems come with an official vendor hardware warranty for 3 years (can be extended up to 5 years), according to which, during this period, the company provides at its expense delivery of a replacement for the defective parts, at the place of equipment installation (onsite delivery)
Onsite delivery does not mean that the replacement procedure is completed, and if, for example, you cannot, for some reason, remove the failed hard disks from the disk shelf described in the documentation and replace it with the delivered one, then the onsite replacement operation for some This is the extra money your local NetApp partner is making. However, despite the unfortunate practice of the enterprise industry, NetApp does not impose such services on its customers, as many of our competitors, alas, do. NetApp storage systems are traditionally customer serviceable, and if you have enough straight arms to take out a hotswap disk with a burning red light and replace it with a working one, or replace any other part that is changed at the system installation site (in avian language of service providers we call this FRU - Field Replaceable Unit), then you can do it yourself, saving on expensive services, usually Russian services, and without losing the vendor’s warranty.

In Moscow and St. Petersburg, that is, in the cities where service warehouses are located, a paid option to upgrade the service to 24x7x4h is also available, that is, four hours around the clock. However, remember that round-the-clock service imposes certain obligations on your company as well, for example, you should have the ability and procedures to accept a night courier with a spare part at the address specified as the “delivery address” in the service contract.

We often hear, especially from customers who have already tried the “service” of a number of, sometimes quite famous, vendors: “Well, your Next Business Day is all fairy tales, it works only in the state of California, or else where“ there ”, in Russia it is impossible! "
The author of a blog devoted to technologies NetApp in Russia , not so long ago tried to analyze the speed of service in Russia using the available records in the Autosupport service database. If everything is usually so good with Moscow, then what about zamkad?
Here are the data that I managed to find (I’ll note that this is not a specially selected data, these are the first available autosport cases related to the delivery of spare parts):

The organization in the city of Surgut, Tyumen Region, has operated FAS3020 (6 disk shelves, 84 pieces) since October 2007.

January 22, 2009, Thursday, at 08:06 PST (Pacific Standard Time, “Middle California”, the time is recorded in the NetApp case system “American.” PST is GMT-8), that is, at 19:06 Moscow time, or 21:06 local, Surgut, the system reports the failure of the drive. (The “non-working” time of the event, in the case of the NBD support mode, automatically transfers it to the next working day, note track) The case is automatically started.

A minute later, 08:07, he was processed by a support staff member, and RMA (Return Materials Autorisation) was established, that is, the delivery team was given.

At 20:54 of the same day, that is, on January 23, at 7:54 am on Friday Moscow or at 9:54 on Friday local, a note is made in the case that the customer has been notified and the delivery contact is confirmed.

January 23, 2009, at 03:56 PST or 16:56 local, a mark is made that the disc has been sent.

By UPS tracking number you can track delivery details:
Delivered on: January 26 (Monday), 2:26 p.m. local time.

Another detected case of “non-Moscow” onsite dielivery.
Kaluga Also FAS3020, 2 disk shelves, from July 2008.

10/15/2009 02:05:22 PST - disk failure is registered in the case.
10/15/2009 05:33:10 PST - RMA is running, you received a confirmation of the shipment from UPS.
10/17/2009 03:34:17 PST - “customer requests case closed on NOW: Hi Disk is replaced. Ok to close ”


As you can see, the efficiency of delivery is close to the stated.

Please also note that the delivery takes place from a warehouse of customs cleared parts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, where a sufficient repair kit is constantly maintained for all systems sold in Russia, and this warehouse is almost independent of the customs’s odd time-consuming, oddities and quirks which have long been filled all dealing with imports from abroad. Delivery from abroad to the warehouse, and further across Russia, is carried out by the well-known and authoritative (and not cheap, by the way) courier company UPS.

Ps. I also wanted to say a few words about the “expansion” of AutoSuport, the My AutoSupport service, the personal web-dashboard of the state and analysis of the configuration and performance of the storage system, as well as the means of “proactive”, that is, proactive monitoring. But I realized that a couple of words can not do, this product is worth a separate article.

Pps. The traditional “photo to attract attention” at the beginning of the article is the back of the FAS3140 system controller, you can see two four-port Gigabit Ethernet cards installed as I / O expansion cards and a SAS port card for connecting new Wide SAS disk shelves.