I wanted to get some feedback on this, to be sure I'm not missing something. We have P400i SmartArrays in DL360 and DL380 servers, all of which have dual power supplies connected to redundant power infrastructure, so the likelihood of an unexpected power failure is very, very slim. Given that, is it really even necessary to have a battery installed on the SmartArrays (with write-caching enabled)? Assuming that there is no meaninful chance of a power failure, can I just remove the battery, or does it serve some other function I'm not aware of?
Also, we run with the "Physical Drive Write Cache" option enabled. As I understand it, this option also essentially relies on "no unexpected power outages", since the drives themselves don't benefit from the battery (and don't have their own), so this seems to further support the idea of running without the controller battery.
The thing I can't quite figure out is why HP decided a battery was needed in the first place. The only thing I can come up with is that not all server models that can support the SmartArray controller necessarily have redundant power supplies and/or that not all installations might have redundant power infrastructure.
Note that the purpose of removing the batteries is simply to cut down on maintenance--there are a substantial nubmer of servers of varying ages, and we typically have to replace at least one or two batteries per month. Not a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but if we're not getting any real value out of having the batteries in the first place, why bother?
