Technical Advisory

This Technical Advisory describes an issue which may or may not affect the customer’s product
Intel Technical Advisory TA-933-1
5200 NE Elam Young Parkway
Hillsboro, OR 97124
June 8, 2009
Expander enclosure may go offline causing a RAID failure
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this document may contain design defects or errors known as errata which may cause the product to deviate from published
specifications. Current characterized errata are available on request.
Products Affected
Intel
®
Server Chassis Accessories:
AXX6DRV3GEXP
AXX4DRV3GEXP
Description
Under certain rare conditions the expander enclosure may go offline and the RAID controller will report a failure on all
drives installed in the enclosure. With some RAID controllers, power-cycling the system will be needed to restore the
enclosure operation after the failure.
The frequency of the failure under normal operating conditions is once in 1 to 12 months depending on the system
configuration. The failure may occur with high probability during system FRUSDR update.
With AXX6DRV3GEXP and AXX4DRV3GEXP, the issue occurs only when the IPMB cable is connected between the
enclosure and the server board.
Root Cause
When the hot-swap controller receives an IPMI command and a SES command at the same time, the processing of the
commands may fail and may result in a firmware crash. This causes the expander enclosure to go offline
Corrective Action / Resolution
Intel has fixed the issue by preventing I2C transactions from preempting outgoing SSP transactions. The fix is included
in firmware version 2.12 for the expander enclosures.
The hot-swap controller firmware version 2.12 for the expander enclosures will be released around 12 June 2009.
It will be available for download at http://support.intel.com/support/motherboards/server/
.
Please contact your Intel Sales Representative if you require more specific information about this issue.
Enterprise Platforms & Services Division
Intel Corporation