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 »
I\’ve written about fillwords a lot (see here, here, and here) but I didn\’t show you much about the different symptoms an incorrect fillword setting may incur. As you\’ve seen fillwords are a very nifty way of maintaining bit and word-sync on a serial transmission link when no actual frames are sent. Furthermore they also
Fillwords IDLE vs ARBff (one last time) Read More »
As mentioned in my previous post it only takes a single device to really cause some serious havoc in a storage environment. Now, \”Why\”, you may ask, do we have all these redundant kit in our environment like dual fabrics, redundant controllers, dual HBA\’s , MPIO software etc whilst this \”slow drain device\” is the
One rotten apple spoils the bunch – 2 Read More »
Last week I had another one. A rotten apple that spoiled the bunch or, in storage terms, a slow drain device causing havoc in a fabric. This time it was a blade-center server with a dubious HBA connection to the blade-center switch which caused link errors and thus corrupt frames, encoding errors and credit depletion.
One rotten apple spoils the bunch – 1 Read More »
There has been quite some confusion around the use of fill words with the adoption of the 8G fibre-channel standard. Some admins have reported that they have problems connecting devices on this speed as well as numerous headaches in long-distance replication especially when DWDM/CWDM equipment is involved.An ordered set is a transmission word used to
Fill Words. What are those, what do they do and why are they needed Read More »
