I spotted something about syslogd that wasn’t functioning, or at least hung while loading. Eventually I pressed Ctrl+C: voila, output, and the node continued booting. Still, no output, not even when pressing other keys. 115200 baud, 8 data bits, 1 stop bit, no parity, HW flow control. Of course, you check the serial settings. Usually I press Enter, and for a new Isilon cluster that should repeat the 4 options available: Create a new cluster, Join an existing cluster, Exit Wizard, and Reboot into SmartLock Compliance mode. You need to send a key press first to wake up the terminal. When connecting the serial cable, it’s normal that you will not have anything on your PuTTy screen. The H400 nodes (there’s four in a chassis) powered on automatically once power was applied. Cabled everything up (back-end, front-end and power). We installed the H400 chassis in the rack, added the Ethernet back-end switches. We went with the latter option and built two new clusters for this site. The former option would only push out the transition from Infiniband to Ethernet with another 4-5 years and would be a bit more expensive. This gave us two options: install Infiniband cards in the new Gen 6 nodes, or build a new Ethernet based cluster and use SyncIQ to migrate the data. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to mix and match Infiniband and Ethernet backends. One of the most fundamental changes compared to previous generations, is that the 6 th generation of Isilon nodes supports an Ethernet back-end. The Isilon H400 node is part of the 6 th generation of Isilon hardware. Eventually, it would need a reformat before it would function properly again… However, it would never finish that boot, instead halting at “/ifs not found”.

With no other options, I pressed Ctrl + C: the screen became responsive again and eventually the node rebooted. I left the node in that state while I installed another cluster, but after two hours or so, nothing had changed. It allowed me to go through the initial cluster creation wizard, but didn’t run through all the steps and scripts afterwards. While installing a new Dell EMC Isilon H400 cluster, I noticed node 1 in the chassis was acting up a bit.

Isilon h500