Home > Storage > PowerMax and VMAX > Storage Admin > Reliability, Availability, and Serviceability on PowerMax 2500 and 8500 Arrays > Power-down operation
When a system is powered down or transitioned to offline, or when environmental conditions trigger a vault situation, a vaulting procedure occurs. First, the part of global memory that is saved reaches a consistent image (no more writes). The directors then write the appropriate sections of global memory to the NVMe vault drives, saving multiple copies of the logical data. The SPS modules maintain power to the system during the vaulting process for up to five minutes.