When looking at the Device Management window of the NetVault GUI, SmartDisk will show as Offline, but will then show again as Online. The NVBU Server may also send an Automatic Netvault Event Notification, if those are configured to notify when a device is unavailable.
The "Device SmartDisk - [SmartDisk_Instance_Name] has gone offline" error or event notification can occur due to an issue with either:
1.) the SmartDisk server's network connection momentarily dropping
< or >
2.) some other problem with resource contention delaying or preventing the "Are you still up? <---> Yes, I'm here" handshake between the NVBU Server and SmartDisk to complete before the NVBU Server says, "No, I guess you're down, so I'll update your status to Offline."
In either scenario, during a subsequest request from the NVBU Server to the SmartDisk server does succeed, so NVBU returns the SmartDisk status to Online.
Go through the Windows Event Viewer's System and Application logs on the SmartDisk server and see what errors or warnings are logged just *before* the NVBU Server saw that SmartDisk was no longer available. Address any errors that you see listed there.
If no errors are found in the Windows Event Viewer's System and Application logs, Windows performance & resource monitoring can be set up to track CPU and memory usage for review at the time of the next notification that SmartDisk has gone down. Spikes in CPU or memory usage at that time could cause the delays in communication between the NVBU Server and the SmartDisk server.
