Dual HBA\’s, Dual Fabrics, redundant cache, RAID-ed disks, dual controllers or switched matrices, HA X-bars, multipath software installed and all OS drivers, firmware, microcode etc etc is up-to-date. In other words you\’re all sorted and you can sleep well tonight. And then Murphy strikes…….. As I\’ve described in my previous articles it takes one single […]
The great misunderstanding of MPIO Read More »
A couple of months ago Brocade invited me to come to San Jose for their \”next-gen/new/great/ what-have-ya\” big box. Unfortunately I had something else on the agenda (yes, my family still comes first) and I had to decline. (they didn\’t want to shift the launch of the product because I couldn\’t make it. Duhhhh.) So what is new? Well,
Brocade just got Bigger and Better Read More »
Credit – who doesn\’t want to have lots of it at the bank According to Wikipedia the short definition in finance terms is : Credit is the trust which allows one party to provide resources to another party where that second party does not reimburse the first party immediately (thereby generating a debt, but instead arranges
One rotten apple spoils the bunch – 4 Read More »
In the previous 2 blog-posts we looked at some areas why a fibre-channel fabric still might have problems even with all redundancy options available and MPIO checking for link failures etc etc. The challenge is to identify any problematic port and act upon indications that certain problems might be apparent on a link. So how
One rotten apple spoils the bunch – 3 Read More »
As mentioned in my previous post it only takes a single device to really cause some serious havoc in a storage environment. Now, \”Why\”, you may ask, do we have all these redundant kit in our environment like dual fabrics, redundant controllers, dual HBA\’s , MPIO software etc whilst this \”slow drain device\” is the
One rotten apple spoils the bunch – 2 Read More »
Last week I had another one. A rotten apple that spoiled the bunch or, in storage terms, a slow drain device causing havoc in a fabric. This time it was a blade-center server with a dubious HBA connection to the blade-center switch which caused link errors and thus corrupt frames, encoding errors and credit depletion.
One rotten apple spoils the bunch – 1 Read More »
When looking at the network market there is one clear leader and that is Cisco. Their products are ubiquitous from home computing to enterprise Of course there are others like Juniper, Nortel, Ericson but these companies only scratch the surface of what Cisco can provide. These companies rely on very specific differentiators and, given the fact they are
Brocade vs Cisco. The dance around DataCentre networking Read More »
Many customer cases I handle are related to poor connectivity. A connectivity problem can be caused by unclean connectors, broken cables or SFP\’s. (See one of my earlier blog posts). Although the switches are capable or identifying physical issues and subsequently notifying administrators, it\’s hardly ever being followed up. Very often an acute issue is
Brocade Fabric Watch – The most underutilised feature Read More »
There has been quite some confusion around the use of fill words with the adoption of the 8G fibre-channel standard. Some admins have reported that they have problems connecting devices on this speed as well as numerous headaches in long-distance replication especially when DWDM/CWDM equipment is involved.An ordered set is a transmission word used to
Fill Words. What are those, what do they do and why are they needed Read More »
I attended Cisco Live this week in Melbourne. Since it was very close to home and Cisco was kind enough to provide me with an entry ticket. (Many thanks for this.) While strolling around the expo floor I ran into the nice people from Fluke Networks who were showing their testing equipment and of course
The importance of clean fibre optics Read More »
