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 »
In the IT world a panic is most often related to a operating systems kernel to run out of resources or some unknown state where it cannot recover and stops. Depending on the configuration it might dump its memory contents to a file or a remote system. This allows developers to check this file and
Appalling state of Storage Networks Read More »
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 »
Whenever you see Fabricwatch throw a lot of a lot of FW-1050 warning messages around indicating an out of boundary power value on SFP\’s it is most likely these ports have never been polled by the CP\’s. 2014/10/08-04:04:27, [FW-1050], 94159, SLOT 5 | FID 128, WARNING, xxxxxx, Sfp Supply Voltage for port 7/13, is below
FabricWatch FW-1050 alerts on SFP power failures Read More »
In some of my previous articles here and here I explained how to obtain a supportsave via BNA (Brocade Network Advisor) and/or DCFM (Data Centre Fabric Manager) and which one to grab. But what happens if you don\’t have BNA or are not able to manage these switches via BNA. The best way to do
How to obtain a Brocade SupportSave without BNA or DCFM Read More »
Very often I get involved in cases whereby a massive amount of host logs, array dumps, FC and IP traces are taken which could easily add up to many gigabytes of data. This is then accompanied by a very synoptic problem description such as \”I have a problem with my host, can you check?\”. I\’m
5-minute initial troubleshooting on Brocade equipment Read More »
A buddy of mine posted this article and it reminded me of the presentation I did for the Melbourne VMUG back in April of this year. The first law of the Time Lords | Aussie Storage Blog: If you have ever worked in support (or had the need to check on events in general as
The first law of the Time Lords | Aussie Storage Blog Read More »
After a very busy couple of weeks I\’ve spent some time to dissect the release notes of Brocade FOS 7.1 and I must say there are some really nice features in there but also some that I REALLY think should be removed right away. It may come to no surprise that I always look very critical to whatever come
Brocade FOS 7.1 and the cool features Read More »
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 »
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 »
