Technical Support Bulletins

Drive Firmware Update Advisory March 2025 (SPT-TSB-0188)

Newly qualified drive firmware updates became available from January 15 to March 15 of 2025 for 6 drive models from Phison and Solidigm. If any of these drives are installed in your DDN storage systems, please contact DDN Support to obtain the latest firmware and an upgrade plan. Instructions for checking installed firmware versions are provided in the bulletin.

ALERT! Drive firmware updates are never merely cosmetic. All drive firmware updates are designated MANDATORY by DDN Engineering.

DataFlow May Delete Data When Management Task Is Removed (SPT-TSB-0187)

In certain versions of DDN DataFlow, under certain specific conditions, data may be deleted in error or advanced task configurations may be lost if a data management task is removed from the system. Lost task configurations must be restored manually. Deleted data must be recovered from backup. Upgrading to DataFlow 4.2.2.21 or higher prevents this issue. Details in bulletin.

Drive Firmware Update Advisory January 2025 (SPT-TSB-0186)

Newly qualified drive firmware updates became available from 15 November 2024 through 15 January 2025 for 48 drive models from HGST, Phison, Solidigm, and Western Digital (WDC). If any of these drives are installed in your DDN storage equipment, please contact DDN Support to obtain the new firmware and an upgrade plan.

Drive firmware updates are mandatory unless specifically noted otherwise.

Unrecoverable Bad Blocks on Shutdown, Restart, or Upgrade to SFA OS Versions Prior to 12.5.0 (SPT-TSB-0183)

In a certain corner case on versions of SFA OS prior to 12.5.0, the shutdown, restart, or upgrade of an SFA controller may lead to unrecoverable bad blocks. Customers are advised to upgrade to SFA OS 12.5.0 or higher, or to install a fix kit on both controllers in the storage subsystem. Alternative shutdown and restart procedures are also provided in this bulletin. Please contact DDN Support for the fix kit and an upgrade plan.

Drive Firmware Update Advisory October 2024 (SPT-TSB-0182)

Drive firmware updates are never merely cosmetic. All drive firmware updates
are designated MANDATORY by DDN Engineering.

Newly qualified firmware updates became available in June through October of 2024 for 42 drive models. If any of these drives are installed in your storage system, please contact DDN Support to obtain the latest firmware and an upgrade plan.

Phison NVMe Drive Timeouts May Trigger Auto Write Lock (SPT-TSB-0176 B0)

Updated and re-issued to a wider audience.

SFA systems with Phison NVMe drives can experience long delays in the execution of drive commands. These delays may be long enough to trigger an IOC_CMD_TIMEOUT event. Multiple IOC_CMD_TIMEOUT events in a short period of time will cause the drive to be failed. If two drives in a pool are failed and a third drive in that pool experiences an IOC_CMD_TIMEOUT, SFA OS will place the affected virtual disk (VD) in an auto-write-lock (AWL) state. Once in this AWL state, the VD cannot be written to. New drive firmware resolves this issue. A recovery procedure is provided. (SPT-TSB-0176)

Workaround to Monitor Mixed Versions of EXAScaler with 6.3.1 (SPT-TSB-0181)

EXAScaler 6.3.1 and DDN Insight 4.5 have migrated their monitoring technology to Prometheus. As part of this change, the collectd daemon that supports older versions of DDN Insight was removed from EXAScaler 6.3.1. Consequently, if the customer runs multiple versions of EXAScaler across different nodes in the network, DDN Insight is unable to monitor all nodes on the same pain of glass. A workaround is available.

SMB Issue with IntelliFlash on H6x00 and N6x00 Appliances (SPT-TSB-0180)

IntelliFlash applications using extended file attributes extensively in an SMB environment may encounter an issue causing a ZFS thread to hog CPU and delay the processing of SMB network packets. The network appears nonresponsive. Please contact DDN Support for a software fix and upgrade plan.

EXAScaler NSDS Hotfix Addresses NFS Export Issues (SPT-TSB-0177)

NFS export in NSDS can become unresponsive due to issues with NFS lock reclaim and fails to read Lustre project quotas. These issues are addressed in Hotfix-3 for EXAScaler 6.3.0 NSDS (NFS and Samba Data Services). This fix supersedes all previous versions of NSDS for EXAScaler 6.3.0.

Drive Firmware Update Advisory June 2024 (SPT-TSB-0178)

Firmware updates for 19 drives were qualified by DDN Engineering from April to June 2024. Drive firmware updates are never merely cosmetic. Customers are strongly advised to update their drive firmware promptly.

Affected product IDs and firmware versions are listed in the bulletin, along with instructions for how to determine which drives are installed in your DDN storage system. Affected customers should contact DDN Support for updated firmware and an update plan.