Category Archives: Brocade

Brocade 48000 director End-of-Support notification

Brocade 2 Comments

Normally I don’t send out these notices as I think its the responsibility of the storage administrator and vendor sales-teams to keep up-to-date with product life-cycles, however in this case I make an exception. The Brocade 48000 has been a very reliable workhorse since 2006 where it succeeded the, then seemingly overpriced, 12000 and 24000 directors. In contradiction to its predecessors, the 48K gained massive popularity mainly due to the attractive price-point and longevity of life-span in addition to a fairly matured and well featured (for that time) FOS operating system.It was also the last system featuring the well known SilkWorm logo. (Which I like more than the B-wing symbol. :-))

Brocade_Silkworm_logo

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The technical pathways of Brocade in cloud storage adoption

Brocade Storage Networking No Comments

Brocade isn’t always very forthcoming about what they are working on. Obviously a fair chunk of development and engineering efforts are spent on cloud integration  and enablement of their software and hardware stack into this computing methodology. Acquisitions like Foundry, Vyatta and now Connectem show that the horizon has broadened the views of Brocade. To keep up with the ever increasing demands for network features and functions it makes sense to review the current product lines they have and when you read between the lines you may be able to spot some interesting observations.

Cloud Storage

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Cross-fabric collateral damage

Config Guide Storage Networking Troubleshooting No Comments

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 separated) share components like hosts, arrays or tapes.. If a physical issue in one fabric is impacting that shared component the performance and host IO may even impact totally unrelated equipment on another fabric and spin out of control.

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Brocade Fabric Assist Zones

Brocade No Comments

Huh, what did they come up with now??? A new way of zoning? FCoE zones? Is this the opposite of target initiated zoning??

Well, no, actually nothing of such sort. Brocade abandoned FA and QL zoning over a decade ago but so very rarely I run into it. From a FOS configuration perspective these zone still operate but no management application is able to handle it any more.

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Brocade Network Advisor Database access

Brocade No Comments

So every now and then I get the question if it is possible to access the BNA database in order to get info which then can be used to fill an excel spreadsheet for reference purposes. The though process is that often BNA/Storage administrators don’t want server admins to fool around in BNA and accidentally make changes or configuration mistakes but in the same time be able to provide insight in the SAN from a install base and configuration perspective. Although there is nothing wrong with the intent of that thought the method is however very questionable.

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Brocade Distinguished Architect

Brocade 4 Comments

Since I’m working in the IT business for quite some time and especially have been focusing on the storage side of the fence I’d thought I’d put my knowledge to the test and try to get some personal satisfaction (if I’d succeeded that is). I’ve never been a huge fan of vendor certifications to be honest but that is most likely due to the fact that some vendor certifications used to be too over-rated. I can recall the Microsoft Certified System Engineer track which, back then in the late 90’s and early 2000, was a certificate that was on the “to-have” list of every engineer simply because you almost certainly got short-listed on every job-application out there but certainly not due to the level of knowledge you needed to have of pass these tests. I had quite a few of these guys who spent 2 weeks on a crash-course boot-camp and passed the MCSE exam who really fell from a cliff as soon as I let them administer a 500 server and 2000 client windows NT/2000/2003 environment (back then this was a fairly beefy environment, nowadays it’s pretty common to have this in SMB environments as well.) The MCSE “New Style” has completely replaced the old certification path and you need some deep knowledge and a fair couple of years with your feet on the data-centre floor before you’ll be able to pass the tests.

bro_edu5_dist_arch_rgb

Let me make one thing very clear:

If you haven’t worked in an environment with equipment, software, procedures and policies your are trying to obtain a certificate for, your accreditation is useless.

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Upgrade FOS leads to fabric segmentation.

Brocade No Comments

I ran into this in my lab when upgrading a switch which caused a fabric-segmentation and obviously the release notes of a previous version show:

Other Important Notes and Recommendations
Management Server Platform Capability support changes in FOS v6.4
FOS v6.4 no longer automatically enables the Management Server (MS) Platform capability when a switch attempts to join a fabric that has these services enabled. This prevents a FOS v6.4 switch from joining such a fabric, and ISL will be disabled with a RAS log message. To allow a FOS v6.4 switch to join such fabrics msPlMgmtActivate command should be used to enable the Management Server platform services explicitly.

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