If you\’ve been laying low during Christmas last year and have overlooked that Brocade announced its first to market with \”Gen 6\” (32G) hardware and FOS code 8, you\’re forgiven. FOS 8 was mainly released to support the new G620 hardware but a lot of functions and features did either not work or were not […]
Brocade FOS version 8 and 32G hardware Read More »
To many it has always been a mystery what happens when you connect fibre-channel switches to each other and all of a sudden magic happens and you can have an host \”talk\” to an array or an other device on an other switch. The same mystery however applies when this doesn\’t work and you see
5.1 ISL/E-port configuration – The right way. Read More »
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
The technical pathways of Brocade in cloud storage adoption 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 »
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
Brocade Fabric Assist Zones 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 »
There is already a fair chunk of functionality in FOS but, being a support-engineer, you always come up with features and functions that will improve storage fabrics. Being on a Ficon course last week and meeting some Brocade friends I requested them to add the following to the (most likely) long RFE (Request for Enhancement)
RFE for Brocade FOS Read More »
I\’ve been writing about troubleshooting issues for a while now and one of the things that is very difficult and most time consuming is correlating events between host systems, switches and storage arrays in the even of storage related errors. My advice has always been the same. Hook everything up to NTP systems, make sure
Time with and without NTP on FC switches Read More »
As you may have read in my previous posts I\’m not really a fan of marketing driven terminology whereby existing technology is re-branded over and over again in order to obfuscate the underlying technology and make things more complex that they really are. The FC Gen-X nonsense is one of them. With Brocade Fabric Vision
Brocade Fabric Vision – Version 1 Read More »
For numerous years entire bibles have been filled with storage design concepts, pro\’s, cons, benefits, cost structures on port-counts vs. performance etc. however whenever I get to see a fabric overview of what is connected to what and how stuff goes back and forth between initiators and targets it always (well around 99% of the
Fabric design, the good the bad and the ugly. Read More »
