As our Pro 6 is used in a business production enviroment, I was looking to purchase a warm standby PSU in case of failure. However, they don't appear to exist!
Am I correct in assuming, unlike the NV+, in the event of PSU failure, the chassis has to be replaced?
Yes I believe the chassis needs to be replaced if the PSU fails. You can purchase a ProSupport contract or simply and Advanced Next Business Day replacement option.
There are components other than the PSU which could fail in a unit so if you really can't afford much downtime having a couple of units is the way to go.
When the original Pro came out, the promotional literature referred to available spare parts and the PSU was listed, but I don't know that it was ever really available. The only spare PSU available is the internal one for the NV and NV+ (v1). I don't understand why you can't buy a spare power brick for the Duo (v1), Duo v2 and NV+ v2 as they simply plug into the back. Every other supplier of devices with power bricks seems to offer them as spares.
One thing you might want to consider is that with a second chassis, set it up as a backup unit and using rsync let it update itself every night. If the problem is hardware and you know the array is fine, simply shut down both units and swap the drive arrays. When you power up the second NAS with the array from the first (keeping the drives in the same bay if possible) the only thing that will have changed is the MAC address and the user will not see any difference as all the configuration goes with the drives. (Of course they do have to be off the network while you do this swap, but it only takes minutes).
Then if you have problems with your array on the primary (say it's name NAS A) all you have to do is shut it down and rename the backup unit from NAS B for example to NAS A also changing the static IP and all your users can just keep on working. Then when you get the array of the first unit corrected, and with this arrangement you have the luxury of doing a factory reset which wipes the drives and all errors while the users are still up and running, you can then set it up as the backup. You do have to manually change the backup job s over to the new primary.
BTW - I do this at home using 201, 202 etc for the last portion of the static IP and my primary is NAS1 (IP 201) and my backup is NAS2 (IP 202). Just the other day I shut down my primary unit, a two year old NVX, installed the four drives in a new Pro 6, and when it powered up, everything on my network was configured as before, and all the back up jobs ran from NAS1 to NAS2. Then when the NVX was cleaned up and all the dust blown out, it sat for a few days until I swapped the drives back. If you map NAS shares to drive letters this works well with that also. In fact, this is the main reason I do this, for then all my mapping, defaults and links work flawlessly.
For a business environment, the spare chassis is an effective insurance policy as nothing will get you up quicker.
I used to do exactly what you describe when we had 2 NV+ boxes.
Recently I swapped the primary with a Pro6 but kept one of the old NV+ units as a backup.
In order to allow me to have the kind of redundancy and quick recovery you describe, I should purchase another Pro6. I'll perhaps look to do this early next year, as the other NV+ approaches it's 4th Birthday. 🙂
