Credibility (I suppose) …

I was discussing a customer’s configuration the other day and noted, just as a matter of course, that he should update all firmware involved in his system … motherboard, backplane, card and drives and OS driver.

What surprised me, I presume because I’m used to this stuff, was the customers reaction to updating drive firmware. It appears that he has never had to do this before. His reaction was one of complete incredulity. “Surely you’re joking” was the polite version of his response.

Now for the last year this has been common practice for every system I deal with to update drive firmwares. However, it seems that it’s all down to a vendor/product’s credibility status when it comes to updates. If I was talking to the customer about Windows, updates are just a matter of routine. Even when discussing Adaptec RAID cards customers are pretty used to firmware updates (we do them quite a lot). It’s interesting to look at motherboard and backplane firmware updates. The customers are generally aware of them, and might have done them once or twice before, but not commonly.

When it comes to drives, many of the old timers in the industry have never done one, and are pretty scared/nonplussed when told they have to do 16 of them in one server (and that there is no 100% guarantee that the drive’s data will remain intact), and are pretty hard to convince that I’m just not leading them up the garden path (or trying to dodge the blame). Therefore it seems the pecking order for credibility of getting it right the first time is:

Drives
Backplanes
Motherboards
Cards
Operating Systems

As the list goes down people seem more willing to accept that there will be changes and updates are necessary. Interestingly, while typing this little ditty I’ve come to the realisation about how much software is involved in each of the components mentioned. Drives certainly have software, but (and this will get me into trouble) it’s not as complex as an OS. Backplanes, at least in the form of smart backplanes with SES2 processors certainly have software (firmware). Motherboards have lots (BIOS etc), cards even more (BIOS and their own low-level operating system), while OS are, of course, just pure software.

So it would appear that the weak link in the chain is the software component of each product. Now that’s not really telling anyone anything … we all knew that. However, the next time a tech tells you to update a firmware don’t be so surprised … the stuff is everywhere.

Ciao
Neil