Home > Storage > PowerStore > Data Protection > Dell PowerStore: Metro Volume > Failure Scenario – Array failure
In this scenario, Array 1 experienced a complete failure.
Each metro session on Array 2 sends a fracture request to the witness. Because Array 1 is down, the requests from Array 2 are declared winners, allowing the volumes on Array 2 to stay online.
On Host1
For example, path sdal and sdl of metro-vol-001, connected to Array 2, change from Active/Non-optimized to Active/Optimized, and path sdan, sdat, sdn, sdq connected to Array 1 are removed. Similar changes happen to metro-vol-002.
metro-vol-001 sdal active 10 active/optimized array2-nb-iom0-p0
metro-vol-001 sdl active 10 active/optimized array2-nb-iom0-p1
metro-vol-001 sdab active 10 active/non optimized array2-na-iom0-p0
metro-vol-001 sdb active 10 active/non optimized array2-na-iom0-p0
On Host 2
metro-vol-001 sdan active 50 active/optimized array2-nb-iom0-p0
metro-vol-001 sdn active 50 active/optimized array2-nb-iom0-p1
metro-vol-001 sdab active 10 active/non optimized array2-na-iom0-p0
metro-vol-001 sdb active 10 active/non optimized array2-na-iom0-p1
Metro and Witness status on the surviving PowerStore appliance Array 2
Recovery of Array 1
In the absence of a witness, the Polarization mechanism would have taken the non-preferred volumes on Array 2 offline, resulting in I/O errors and data unavailable for VM1 and VM2. It is possible to promote the non-preferred volumes and bring them online manually, but it requires an operator to intervene and execute the process manually, which prolongs the downtime of the applications.