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 »
Ughh, upgrades, maintenance, risk of downtime, out of hours work and pulling all-nighters or even weekends when your wife and kids start wondering who that strange man is that sometimes shows his face through the back-door. But what made you decide to do the upgrades on your OS, firmware, applications etc.
Release notes and upgrades. Decision time. 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 »
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 »
In the previous 2 blog-posts we looked at some areas why a fibre-channel fabric still might have problems even with all redundancy options available and MPIO checking for link failures etc etc. The challenge is to identify any problematic port and act upon indications that certain problems might be apparent on a link. So how
One rotten apple spoils the bunch – 3 Read More »
When looking at the network market there is one clear leader and that is Cisco. Their products are ubiquitous from home computing to enterprise Of course there are others like Juniper, Nortel, Ericson but these companies only scratch the surface of what Cisco can provide. These companies rely on very specific differentiators and, given the fact they are
Brocade vs Cisco. The dance around DataCentre networking Read More »
Why do I keep wondering why companies don\’t maintain their infrastructure. It looks to be more of an exception than a rule to come along software and firmware which is newer than 6 months old. True, I admit, it\’s a beefy task to keep this all lined up but then again you know this in
