As some of you may recall about a decade ago I made a proposal to incorporate more intelligence into the end-devices to be able to better react to changing conditions in fabrics. I called it the \”Error Reporting with Integrated Notification\” framework (mind the acronym here. :-)) Basically the intention was to have end-devices check […]
FPIN – The Holy Grail of SAN Stability Read More »
Ok, truth be told it is not a Flow Vision bug but in FOS 9.0.0 it is flagged as such under defect 653188. As you know Flow Vision can be configured to monitor certain traffic flows. SCSI commands such as read, write, xfer-rdy,, status etc can be viewed with the flow –show command.
Interesting Flow Vision bug Read More »
If you\’ve read my articles over the last decade or so you\’ve seen I\’m keen on maintenance. Both from a physical hardware as well as software perspective a storage environment needs to be kept in tip-top shape at all times.
Crackdown on FOS support Read More »
Whenever you\’ve encountered an output of a nameserver entry you may have come across the phenomenon that the fabric has no clue what the attached device is. For a FC switch an attached device (or N-port in technical terms) is not more than a source or destination where frames originate from or can be sent
Initiator, Target, Both or None ?? Read More »
If there is one thing that gets people relatively annoyed is that their data is not available for a certain amount of time. You can\’t get to your sales data, orders cannot be fulfilled, your tracking and tracing options for your goods on their way to your customers does not show up etc. That makes
Data Corruption in Storage Area Networks Read More »
Arrays from all vendors have significant troubleshooting capabilities but in most cases these are scambled in the most obscure way you can imagine. You need special tools to be able to have a look at the log-dumps that come out of these systems. The nice part is that they contain a wealth of information including
Why frames get dropped at your storage array Read More »
With the advance of the FC-GS and FC-SW protocols the change, or more the enhancement, of being able to use Target Driven Zoning provided Brocade with the option to tinker a bit on the implementation of the functionality.
Time to rethink your zoning strategy –peerzones Read More »
FDMI stands for Fabric Device Management Interface and is such an enormously cool feature and unfortunately one of the least used. From an operational management perspective FDMI provides a wealth of information to the fabric regarding the attached devices. The thing that flabbergasted me is that almost no device (HBA/Array) has this turned on of
Why FDMI is compulsory (or should be!!) Read More »
So now and then you run into this issue where, no matter which configuration you try, a switch port always shows: 86 10 6 3a5600 id N8 Online FC L-Port 1 public Even though all settings seem to be OK, fillwords are correct, HBA or array settings are the same as others, no
Port stuck in L-port mode Read More »
I really think I should stop with fillword discussions but here is one more. What happens even if you have set the correct fillword, have made sure all hardware is in tip-top shape and still the encoding errors fly around like a swarm of hornets. Then the problem of ISI might be more problematic. The
Signal quality and link stability Read More »
