I try to keep the raid groups defraged and do periodic reviews of connectivity status for initiators that are no longer logged in.

I am looking forward to hearing what other people do

Beyond regularly scheduled FLARE upgrades there is really not much that needs to be done as far as maintenance of the array is concerned. And this is pretty much the same with any decent array from any vendor.

For the hosts though there are more maintenance tasks, like ensuring the hosts are using the latest supported HBA drivers and firmware, and updating PowerPath and Navisphere agents. Use the E-lab Interoperability Guide to determine the latest supported revisions for your environment.

Now there are regular administrative tasks to perform on a regular basis and I think the items that shearermd fall into this category. The RAID group defrag task is for arranging the free space in a RAID group into one contiguous block. This does not defrag the file system and is only needed if you have deleted LUNs in the RAID group and need to re-order the remaining LUNs to make the free space contiguous.

Along those same lines are removing unused LUNs, Storage Groups, and RAID Groups so that your storage reports will accurately reflect the used and available storage.

Actually I meant some official EMC recomendation like a list of mandatory regular activities (i. e. check status of everything, dust removal and so on).

There are not necessarily official recommendations, but of course you have to worry about the arrays health, SAN health and servers health.

I would say that the most important thing is to check periodically if the monitoring is OK. For example when there is a drive down on a array, I check if each monitoring tool have done its job.

Once it is OK, I am a bit more quiet because problems can occur with less risk!

i know in some scenarios it's not possible, but i typically do a walk-through to make sure there are no amber lights on the unit itself, if using dial-up ..make sure the modem has two red lights (it's on). I have seen situations where the unit had a failed drive, but because navi agent service died on the call-home server ..the unit was not calling-home.

Yes dynamox is true, I do the same! I like to see green lights

Also Aran said something important about upgrading FLARE, drivers, firmware and so on. EMC will not say you every time when your configuration is no longer supported, it is your roll to use E-lab and check this. When the FLARE upgrade time comes, it is a good opportunity to check everything.

OK, so you are talking about monitoring procedures not necessarily maintenance procedures.

I have never seen any best practices documentation from EMC on monitoring best practices but I think what dynamox and ovivier mentioned pretty much covers the daily monitoring. Do you check Navisphere daily to ensure there aren't any alerts you missed? I would also check your switches daily for down ports and fabric errors. What host level monitoring do you have? There are host level counters that will be helpful like monitoring the state of powerpath paths, disk counters, etc....

Every morning I walk over to my boxes and talk sweet words to them. That's about it. They always keep running

Well the European models are a little sensitive I hear, something to do with the different power you use over there.

I also check the lights each day (yes, green is good), and while I am in the server room, I make sure the AC is running OK, make sure no strange lights on the UPS and stuff like that. I test at least once a month call home dial up to make sure that is working. I also log into Navishpere each day to check on any faults and alerts because I don¿t trust email.