A New Blog and Musings on IBM Technical University in New Orleans

NOTE:  This post was migrated from my old blog site after that hosting site decided to sunset personal blogs.


Welcome To My Blog!
Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you will follow my blog.  I will use this space to give you updates on IBM Storage and Storage Networking products, as well as tips and tricks you can use for troubleshooting and verifying best-practice configurations on your storage network and storage networking products.  
For a bit of background, I work with the IBM  SAN Central support team in IBM Storage Support.  We work on most storage networks, but specialize in fibre-channel and FCoE storage networking.  My team provides root-cause analysis for events that have happened on the SAN as well as isolating issues that are ongoing.  We work with all of the IBM product support teams - if a product touches a storage network, we have most likely worked with it.   We are also the source at IBM for the XGig fibre-channel trace tool, in the event that a tool is needed to troubleshoot a problem.

Some Future Posts
Check back on this space over the next week or two.  Planned topics include the quickest way to turn your racecar Flash Storage into a Yugo with bad SAN design,  some best practices for Storwize/SVC Port Masking and how you can use the device connectivity listing for troubleshooting, and lastly some best practices for collecting Cisco MDS switch logs.  This will include what SAN Central will ask for, so that you can have the require logs uploaded before a problem gets sent to us.   A good writeup on collecting Brocade logs is here at Sebastian Thaele's blog.
IBM Technical University in New Orleans






Last week I presented at Technical University (Tech U)  in New Orleans.  The Tech U events are intended to replace the technical sessions that were previously available at IBM Edge.  Attendance was about 800 IBM clients.  My sessions were on the path an FC Frame takes through a Cisco MDS Director, and the aforementioned Storwize Port Masking Best Practice.  I also created a poster for the poster sessions on Storwize Fabric Connectivity Best Practice.  The poster is here, but as mentioned above I'll have a blog post with more detail soon. 
 Some thoughts from New Orleans:
  • It's worth attending Glenn Anderson's public speaking sessions, if you are at a conference where he is leading them. If nothing else, you'll be entertained.  
  • I think NVMe is the future, although the earliest we will see it in enterprise is 2018.  I'll have more thoughts on this in a future post. In the meantime,  This IBM RedPaper is worth reading. 
  • Spectrum Virtualize v8.1 has support for hot-spare cluster nodes.  You can read more about it here at @TonyPearson's blog.  This will be another future blog post with some technical requirements and  best-practice recommendations​ for connectivity and zoning of the spare node.
  • Since it was announced today, I can mention Spectrum Control Foundation.  The announcement is here.  

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