Ever since the dawn of time the storage administrators have been indoctrinated with redundancy. You have to have everything at least twice in order to maintain uptime and be able to achieve this to a level of around 99,999%. This is true in many occasions however there are exceptions when even dual fabrics (ie physically […]
Cross-fabric collateral damage Read More »
I’ve found that in many cases it is not the technical people being unwilling to maintain their infrastructure but more to the fact there is so much pressure from commercial and legal entities within companies that every change or action that could potentially have a technical side-effect needs to be reviewed, discussed, assessed and re-assessed
Reading a post from Hans DeLeenheer (VEEAM) which ramped up quite a bit including responses from Calvin Zito (HP), Alex McDonald (NetApp) and Nigel Poulton. The discussion started on a comment that XIO had \”special\” firmware which improved IO performance. Immediately the term \”short-stroking\” came up which leads to believe X-IO is cheap-skating on their technologies. I
Short stroking disk drives to improve performance Read More »
Historically the need to segregate fibre-channel traffic and have the option to prioritize frames and flows has not been high on design agenda of most of the companies I had under my eyes. Most often if the need is there to differentiate between different levels of importance between the various business applications you\’ll very often
8 – Quality of Service Read More »
This topic is hardly ever touched when fabric designs are developed and discussed among storage engineers but for me this always sits on my TODO list before hooking up any HBA or array port. It is as important in the storage world as it has been in the IP networking sector for decades. Historically the
7 – Fabric Security Read More »
FCIP has been around for quite a while. The fine engineers of CNT/McData/Brocade/Rhapsody/Vixel (you name them) saw early one that a method was needed to overcome the, back then, distance limitation of around 10KM. This was not due to a limitation in the FC protocol itself but more due to the fact the hardware back
FCIP configuration, pitfalls and troubleshooting Read More »
This week I had a very interesting question from one of the fellow blog readers. Why do I see no traffic on a new FCIP tunnel when I already have an established tunnel between two Brocade 7800 switches? Although I wasn\’t provided with all the details I\’ll try to describe some of the pitfalls that
Unexpected FCIP tunnel utilisation Read More »
Features and licenses Ever seen these? If not you might just have thrown away one of the most expensive pieces of you purchase. This is the envelope that contains the transaction key which allows you to generate the license for the specific feature you bought. If you have discarded it I must say that is
6 – Non Standard configuration options Read More »
Defaults On the switches there are some default settings which you should enable before taking it into production. First we enable virtual fabrics. (Some OEM\’s have this enabled by default, others don\’t). For the sake of simplicity just enable it. SW0X:>fosconfig –enable vf
5 – Standard configuration options Read More »
Consistency is one of the most important things in a computing environment. There are abundant examples where configuration inconsistencies have led to disastrous events leading up to dropped databases, setting up disk-mirrors in the wrong direction (ie overwriting a perfectly good partition with an empty one), operational mistakes due to wrong or unclear naming conventions
4 – Standards in operation Read More »
