The Grasshopper Outage: Co-Founders Response | Hacker News Reader

The Grasshopper Outage: Co-Founders Response

grasshopper.com

24 pointsdh18 comments

> a simultaneous 2 disk failure in a storage array (...) is a very unusual event

I'd disagree. If you have same model, same production batch of harddrives in a RAID, the chances of simultaneous failure is elevated. Depending on RAID level and workload, it's quite possible two or more drives are loaded (accessed) in exactly the same way. If, again, they are from the same production batch, chances are they have similar production defects in mechanics or semiconductors, thus it makes sense they'd fail almost simultaneously.

The drives in this array are mixed and from different production batches and some have been replaced at different times for a number of reasons. Across an array this size 2 disks failing at the exact same time is very rare as verified by the vendor.

The production batch issue is very real. After seeing an 85% failure rate over 12 months in a batch of 16 high-end Seagates, we no longer purchase more than a few at a time from a particular vendor. Though I will say, even with this, we never had a simultaneous failure.

Agreed, hard drives fail constantly. I've had as many as 3 dead at a time while waiting for hot spares to rebuild in arrays as small as 24 drives. Dual drive failures have happened at least twice that I can remember off the top of my head in the last 3-4 years.

Usually running raid10 for performance reasons but when I don't need fast writes I use raid6 instead of raid5 for anything beyond 8 drives.

Having a DR site and not testing that failover works is the big issue I see here. You could check your theory all day long, but if you never actually do it to make sure it works then you might as well not have a DR site. Similar case to taking backups without ever actually verifying you could restore what you need in the event of a loss. While I'm surprised that actually testing DR capability wasn't listed as something to work on, this sort of open write up is very valuable to both customers and the rest of us as engineers.

I really liked Netflix's approach to testing backup scenarios by creating the Chaos Monkey[1] (Jeff Atwood had good insight as well[2].) The idea of creating a mechanism to test fail over scenarios is something that I wouldn't have thought of prior to the transparency that companies like Grasshopper have shown. So hat tip to them for opening up on a large failure; It makes the rest of the dev community smarter/better because of their honesty.

[1]: http://techblog.netflix.com/2010/12/5-lessons-weve-learned-u... [2]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2011/04/working-with-the-ch...

One great way to ensure your DR site is tested is not to have a it be a special disaster site at all, but rather to have multiple active sites that each regularly serve production traffic. You still need to provision the capacity to handle your traffic even when an entire site is down.

This is a typical case of poor administration at a company blaming a vendor for their problems: 1. Yes, any storage array should work to first protect the integrity of the data 2. Yes, a good DR solution is only as good as the testing and tuning that the administrators have done to ensure it is working properly

Here are some questions: - How many spare drives were in the system when the first and second drive failed? Netapp does not shut down volumes of storage if spares are in the system to take over for the failed drives. - How long was it really before those drives were replaced with a spare that could take over and rebuild? - Why don't you publish your DR plan and explain exactly where it didn't go as tested and planned? Point this out to show where the issue occurred that had been previously tested and shown to work properly.

I am not an employee of NetApp and not even a customer of NetApp. I have used it in the past and like all technologies it requires the care and feeding that is well documented in manuals they provide. And it requires good administrators to do their jobs to test and monitor things and ensure the resources are available for the system to work as designed.

Once you have heard both sides of the story the only thing you learn is that there are more the 2 sides to the story.

When these types of things happen the folks closest to them always leave out details or cannibalize the story so that they can be found blameless. I have been in the IT field for 15 years and seen it time and time again (with many technologies).

I read an email from Grasshopper this AM detailing to their customers what this issue was. It was so vague and left so much to interpretation that it really came across as whiny and misinformed. It was extremely unprofessional to apologize and then blame (without full explanation or root cause).

There's more to this than meets the eye. Believe me.

Since you all are replacing NetApp, I would suggest paying for a full time engineer from the next storage company you buy from. They can manage the array for you (properly) and ensure these things don't happen. Otherwise you'll need your sysadmins to start reading product documentation, following best practices, and testing procedures.

If you want to talk about any of the details I am happy to discuss. I never said that the array went offline because of the failure but the head was under very heavy load trying to recover from it.

The email is a careful balance of information that 90% of people will find useful and not too much information that no one understands it. Never once did we say we are not to blame, actually the opposite, it is our responsibility no matter the vendor or what we replace the hardware with.

Updated Again: disclaimer -- shooting from the hip here. I know how it sucks to have people pissed at you for IT related issues!! I have zero knowledge of this company and have only read about them today.

Basically, this just boils down to a time issue. No data was lost it just took time for things be to rosy again. Restoring from backups or switching to a DR site takes time too. If you have never fully tested the DR site it might take a long time.

It it easy to be Cpt. Obvious; "Well, there's you problem right there" in cases like these but it just sounds like they need better documentation about what to do in the event something like this happens.

Forgetting about the DR site for a minute. Why is the NetApp a single point of failure?? Given they are extremely stable and running multiple heads further reduces this but if a single issue with one array causes massive downtime then you might want to think about a snap mirror to a second filer. Switching to a different storage vendor doesn't sound like it will fix the underlining issue here!!

We have more redundancy than that with NetApp, there are multiple filer heads and SnapMirror relationships and SnapMirror was part of the problem and the process that it runs to make sure all data is correct at all end points.

Ah, ok, much more complex than anything I've touched. Hope it all works out!

We are actually planning to buy some NetApp equipment and have heard nothing but good things.

I am very curious as to why a two disk failure caused an outage. What exactly happened when both disks failed?

We have used NetApp for years and decided to move to Pillar Data Systems as they are much more forward thinking, easier to work with and understand storage systems at a very deep level. NetApp wants you to buy new equipment every few years and force this by increasing support costs very quickly.

The 2 disk failure did not cause the outage, but the process the filer head had to go through to get the data back onto new drives and then further actions taken with SnapMirror and other items to try and recover faster.

The way you've worded this, and the official response, it reads like you didn't have hot spares available?

That being the case, the two disk failures didn't need to be concurrent for you to end up where you did...

RAID-DP and the array always has a hot spare, and we had one cold spare on-site and another there within hours to replace the 2nd failure.

dh, Could you send me an email? my username @ tripadvisor.com

I'd love to chat a bit about your experiences.. I'll even take you out to lunch (I'm right down the street in Newton). :P

You should have an email from me. Happy to chat anytime.

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