Tag Archives: fibre channel
Why FDMI is compulsory (or should be!!)
FDMI stands for Fabric Device Management Interface and is such an enormously cool feature and unfortunately one of the least used. From an operational management perspective FDMI provides...
9 – Long Distance configurations
Storage networks have been used for disaster recovery and business continuity purposes for as long as fibre-channel existed. The moment arrays could communicate to other arrays over either...
Fillwords IDLE vs ARBff (one last time)
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...
Energy Efficient Fibre Channel and related cost savings
For years many storage environments have used both active-active and active-passive multipath (MPIO) access mechanisms to access storage arrays in a dispersed or linear method. On enterprise class...
Time with and without NTP on FC switches
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...
Brocade 65xx series and airflow
This is important!! Now, you would think that when you look at the weather channel and the person tells you there is a wind coming from the North...
FC Frame header, or is there more to it
The FC frame header has not changed since its inception back in the late 80-ies. This shows the absolute rock-solid backward compatibility towards previous generation platforms and vendors....
128GFC Fibre-Channel is here
Well, almost… 32GFC is fixed and at the standard has been ratified and the physical specs are moulded in concrete. In addition to this there are functions that...
CRC errors
In Fibre-Channel, and many other network protocols, the use of CRC (Cyclic Redudancy Check) is adopted to detect corruption of frames. Be aware of the word “frames”!! As...
Unable to provision new Luns (and how to solve it)
A fair number of people have reported that when they want to provision storage to a host this doesn’t seem to work. Only after bouncing a FC port...