No, no. It’s not in conflict with itself. It is now physically split up in multiple codebases each for a specific platform.
Category Archives: Storage Networking
Preventing Information Overload in SAN Management
The standpoint of getting notified when events happen in SAN environments at all costs may need to be reviewed. As many of you know the Broadcom and Cisco switches can customise various thresholds in their respective FOS and NX-OS operating systems.
Brocade uses the MAPS framework which follows a policy based setup.
FPIN – The Holy Grail of SAN Stability
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 for errors along paths which their frames traverse by sending a “query-frame” to the remote device. Each hop along the way could then add its values (errors, counters) to that frame and the remote device would, upon reception of that frame, also add its counters, reverse the SID (Source ID) and DID (Destination ID) and send that same frame back to the original sender. That sender would then be able to make decisions whether to use that same path for subsequent frames or if it would hold of using it temporarily or not at all. Read on.
Interesting Flow Vision bug
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.
FOS version 9 – Gen 7 Fibre-Channel is here
Yahooo… (No not the company) FOS version 9 is here. The one that starts to support Gen 7 (64/256 Gbit) Fibre Channel. Now, just in case you’re getting excited and want to go clickety..clickety..click..upgrade <<<< hold on!!.
PortFencing – the hard or soft way?
As you can read in my previous articles (here, here and here) having a physical issue on any of you FC links is detrimental to your entire FC infrastructure. Not only does it corrupt frames and primitives but is also resulting in traffic flow issues which may even propagate to other fabrics which even have a so called air-gap. (See here)
Dynamic connectivity overview in “switchshow” output
In a Brocade environment the “switchshow” is one of the most used commands out there. It provides a quick overview of what the state of the switch is, switch name, switch attributes and a list of all ports and states. It had however its limitations which, with later codelevels, can be corrected.
The DCX man has retired.
In 2008 Brocade announced the 8G director class switches DCX and DCX-4S. A rather impactful release of a new piece of hardware where the next generation FC ASIC saw light. The Condor.The marketing department of Brocade back then had probably been smoking something as the introduction of the platform was accompanied with a rather cringy “Marvel-like” super-hero called DCX-man. (uhhhhh… shivers….)
Crackdown on FOS support
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.
BNA before 14.4.1 is no longer supported
I’ve already mentioned that BNA was End-of-Life and will/is (be) replaced by SANNav.
As of the time of this writing any BNA version older than 14.4.1 is no longer supported. This basically means that your BNA (or any OEM version) older than that release is not being looked at when yo have a problem with it.