Troubleshooting Nexis "Delayed Write Failure"

The “Delayed Write Failure” message on an Avid Nexis is actually a catch-all error for the client computer having an issue writing to NEXIS. The issue itself could be client OS, networking, or the NEXIS itself and you will just get a Delayed Write Failure message. And once you receive one error, even if it was bad packets on a single transfer, all of your future transfers are likely to fail because the NEXIS client just stops sending traffic altogether since it thinks there is a larger issue.

It may be something as small as that your server was sending files faster than the network could handle and it may have only happened once or twice but if you didn’t reboot you would continue to get the error. The NEXIS client is much more sensitive to this than just using smb/nfs.

  • This error could also be caused by a NEXIS Degrade.  Open up your NEXIS Management console in your web browser and you will see a Storage Manager error that the network is degraded.  When the system gets too many network errors it pauses writing to the drives until it can recover....

  • Other things to check are that your switch has the correct config file and no ports are throwing errors. 

  • Another cause is a bad ethernet cable or one that simply isn't plugged in all the way.  We replaced every cable with Cat6 and we went from daily errors to once a week.

Try adding a bandwidth limit for your server in the NEXIS backend to prevent the server from inadvertently oversaturating NEXIS.