Ciscos' Blazing Fiery Trail
Posted on Thu, Feb 09, 2012 @ 06:00 AM
Cisco Systems announced that another blade server has gone up in flames. The problem was originally brought to the table back in July of 2011 when Cisco discovered that their UCS B440 blade servers carry the risk of overheating and going up in flames. They warned that their high-end B440 blades for their Unified Computing Systems have a potentially disastrous defect that could result in one or more board failures, and emit a flash of light that could send system administrators hearts racing!
In their field notice they originally announced, “Failure of a MOSFET power transistor on the blade server can cause the component to overheat and emit a short flash which could lead to complete board failure.” They went on to say, “In extreme circumstances it could affect the other blades in the chassis by disrupting power flow.”
Cisco went on record saying that the failures appeared to be random, and that there wasn’t a widespread, systemic issue affecting the components. In the weeks that followed, a firmware update was tested and delivered. The idea was the firmware solution would monitor the overheating of the system. If it began to overheat the system would automatically shut down evading another disastrous blaze, and Cisco appeared to have the problem under control.
Then on January 26, the company notified customers using the B440 servers that the firmware patch did detect MOSFET failures and prevent a "potential thermal event," but that since the firmware had been distributed, another B440 in the field had gone poof!. And so Cisco has made hardware modifications to the B440 system board and is now replacing all of the machines currently used by customers.
On February 7, Cisco updated their Field Notice saying, “Cisco has determined that a hardware modification to the UCS B440 Blade Server is appropriate.” They are now replacing all the machines currently used by customers. Cisco did say in the field notice that no other UCS B Series blade servers or C Series rack servers are affected by this MOSFET failure issue.
Only about 5-10% of Cisco’s B440s are affected by the faulty parts, so there’s probably no need to pull out the fire extinguisher, but you should contact Cisco as soon as you can and order a replacement board or if you are a current XSi Alternative to Cisco SMARTnet customer, call our TAC center.
