Inside Storage Networking

Sound monitoring and syslogging practices are the first and sometimes most important step in troubleshooting.  They also the most overlooked as they must be  configured before a problem happens.  If system logging is not configured before a problem happens, valuable information is lost.  Broadcom has two important features that you can use to monitor the health of your Broadcom fabrics and alert you when problems are detected:  Flow Vision (the monitoring) and Monitoring And Alerting Policy Suite (MAPS), which can both monitor and alert if it detects error conditions.  In this post I'll provide a brief overview of each feature and then we'll see how we can integrate Flow Vision into MAPs to provide a comprehensive monitoring and alerting solution.  Flow Vision Flow Vision provides a detailed  view of the traffic between devices on your fabrics.  It captures traffic for analysis to find bottlenecks, see excessive bandwidth utilization, and loo...

Are you sometimes overwhelmed by performance problems on your Storage Network?  Do you wish you had better data on how your network is performing?  If you answered yes to either of these questions, read on to find out about Cisco SAN Analytics and Telemetry Streaming.     The Cisco SAN Analytics engine is available on Cisco 32Gbps and faster MDS 9700 series port port modules and the 32 Gbps standalone switches.   This engine is constantly sampling the traffic that is running through the switches.  It provides a wealth of statistics that can be used to analyze your Cisco or IBM c-Type fabric.  Telemetry Streaming allows you to use an external application such as Cisco DataCenter Network manager to sample and visualize the data that the analytics engine generates to find patterns in your performance data and identify problems or predict the likelihood of a problem occurring. You can find an overview of both SAN Analytics and Telemetry Streamin...

 I wrote  this previous post  on the general requirements for SAN Design for Spectrum Virtualize Hyperswap and Stretched clusters.  In this  follow-on post, we'll look at a sample implementation on a Cisco or IBM C-type fabric.  While there are several variations on implementation (FCIP vs Fibre-Channel ISL is one example) the basics shown here can be readily adapted to any specific design.  This implementation will also show you how to avoid one of the most common errors that IBM SAN Central sees on Hyperswap clusters - where the ISLs on a Cisco private VSAN are allowed to carry traffic for multiple VSANs. We will implement the below design, where the public fabric is VSAN 6, and the private fabric is VSAN 5. The below diagram is a picture of one of two redundant fabrics.  The quorum that is depicted can be either an IP quorum or a third-site quorum.   For the purposes of this blog post, VSAN 6 has already been created and has devices i...