I\’ve been focusing on the implications of physical issues a lot in my posts over the last ~2 years. What I haven\’t touched on is logical performance boundaries which also cause extreme grief in many storage infrastructures which lead to performance problems, IO errors, data-corruption and other nasty stuff you do not want to see […]
Speed mismatch is the death-trap for shared storage Read More »
So this week I had an interesting case. As you know the Hitachi arrays have a replication functionality called HUR (Hitachi Universal Replicator) which is an advanced a-synchronous replication solution offered for Mainframe and OpenSystems environments. HUR does not use a primary to secondary push method but rather the target system is issuing reads to
Performance expectations with ISL compression Read More »
Colin Dixon, most notably known for contributions in the open source world on the networking side of the fence has decided to team up with Brocade. Let me rephrase that: started working for them. This is a significant testimony that Brocade is taking SDN serious in two ways.
Brocade ramps up SDN knowledge with heavy-weight Colin Dixon Read More »
Ok this may seem a bit of me having a go at Brocade\’s successor to Fabric Watch but it isn\’t. This week I ran into a couple of cases where switches were upgraded to FOS 7.2.x and Fabric Watch was converted to MAPS. Nothing wrong with that but it seems that many administrators blindly kick
Brocade MAPS \”non-management\” Read More »
Ok this may seem a bit of me having a go at Brocade\’s successor to Fabric Watch but it isn\’t. This week I ran into a couple of cases where switches were upgraded to FOS 7.2.x and Fabric Watch was converted to MAPS. Nothing wrong with that but it seems that many administrators blindly kick
Brocade MAPS \”non-management\” Read More »
For years many storage environments have used both active-active and active-passive multipath (MPIO) access mechanisms to access storage arrays in a dispersed or linear method. On enterprise class storage arrays with global caches the active-active method is most often used while on modular arrays you\’ll see the active-passive scenario often applied. Inherently this means that
Energy Efficient Fibre Channel and related cost savings Read More »
I\’ve been writing about troubleshooting issues for a while now and one of the things that is very difficult and most time consuming is correlating events between host systems, switches and storage arrays in the even of storage related errors. My advice has always been the same. Hook everything up to NTP systems, make sure
Time with and without NTP on FC switches Read More »
Last week I looked at a Dutch news bulletin headlining that ING, one of the largest banks in The Netherlands, is exploring ways to sell their customers data to the highest bidders on the free market. BigData analytics is what they call it. Collect humongous amounts of data from everyone, everywhere on everything. Yes, you
You are on sale at the banks Read More »
Today I came across a case where the administrator had a bit of an incorrect interpretation of the term \”defzone\”. Brocade uses defzone in case when no normal zoning configuration is active. A defzone (default zone) is a hidden \”dummy\” zoning configuration with no members(*). No WWN\’s, aliases or port-ID\’s ever will be added to
Defzone configuration Read More »
As you may have read in my previous posts I\’m not really a fan of marketing driven terminology whereby existing technology is re-branded over and over again in order to obfuscate the underlying technology and make things more complex that they really are. The FC Gen-X nonsense is one of them. With Brocade Fabric Vision
Brocade Fabric Vision – Version 1 Read More »
