Anyone ever worked with Intel Modular servers?

[UncleDavid218]

I'm new to this company and they have an Intel Modular server chassis (MFSYS25V2) with 2 blades. It was running out of disk space in the pool so one of my first tasks was expanding available space in the pool so we could then extend partitions. I installed 6 new drives and expanded the pool which, according to Intel, is fine to do while the blades are running. Well, the array now shows as being degraded as one drive is coming up as "Dead" but in the event it shows that the controller forced it to read as dead. Plus this happened right after I expanded the pool, so I highly doubt the drive is actually dead.

It's been at the above for about 5 hours now. All of the machines are still functioning just fine, but it sort of worries me.

This is an almost 2.5TB pool so maybe that's what's taking so long? A separate pool would be ideal for disk performance but it wasn't an option since disk space was so precious. Plus this isn't a highly taxed box - just a DC and Exchange server. We will be moving away from this solution within the next 12 months anyway.

Does anyone have any more experience with these things? Intel provides NO documentation on their site and I don't know of anyone who has ever worked with a Modular chassis. I can provide more details if someone knows more about it than I.

This is my last step before reaching out to the vendor, who apparently has a history of being less than stellar.

 

[D-EJ915]

I've had the misfortune to work on them. The raid controller on them is pathetic. I expanded a pool from 3 disks to 4 and it went 1% an hour with 900GB 10k disks. At the time the only thing running on it was a low utilization web server and a few VMs on but not utilized yet.

Same box runs hyper-v and I ran this test within a VM on it:

 

[UncleDavid218]

I've had the misfortune to work on them. The raid controller on them is pathetic. I expanded a pool from 3 disks to 4 and it went 1% an hour with 900GB 10k disks. At the time the only thing running on it was a low utilization web server and a few VMs on but not utilized yet.

Same box runs hyper-v and I ran this test within a VM on it:

LOL at the throughput.

I'm glad you've had similar experiences. It seems like a "jack of all trades, master of none" type unit. I'll wait until the morning and see if my situation improves.

A dedicated SAN is in our near future which makes me a happy camper.

Thank you.