Inside Storage Networking

IBM Storage Insights was updated recently.  Two new Dashboards that were added are the Advisor Dashboard and the Notifications Dashboard.  IBM Storage Support can see the events in these dashboards. In some cases, it allows Support to more quickly identify problems or other issues that need to be addressed.   Like all tables in Storage Insights, both the Advisor and Notifications Dashboard can be filtered and sorted.  You can also export to PDF, CSV or HTML so that you can do additional sorting, filtering or share items in each of the tables. The Advisor Dashboard The Advisor Dashboard is found under the Insights menu.  This dashboard lists recommendations for changes that you can make to improve the stability of your managed IBM Storage systems.  The recommendations include configuration changes, firmware upgrades, and other changes to enhance the stability and performance of your IBM Storage.     Below you see a capture o...

I was at a recent TechU event and had a discussion with a customer about using IBM Storage Insights to monitor host path count.  More specifically, the customer had a recent outage of a few hosts after doing some maintenance work on some storage and the affected hosts were not connected on all the expected paths.    There are options for using the storage data collections to review host connections. For instance, you could write a script that compares the SVC/Storwize host WWPN definitions to the connected devices to see if any WWPNs are not connected to the SVC.  However, it is much more straightforward to configure an alert in IBM Storage Insights Pro.   Alert Policies were previously covered in these two videos:  You can create an Alert Policy for an agentless host and then configure an alert to notify you when the path count changes.  You would need to create separate policies for each operating system, but after you create the fir...

Troubleshooting CRC Errors On Fibre-channel Fabrics There is no "Easy Button" for troubleshooting CRC errors. It is an iterative process. You make a change, you monitor your fabric, and if necessary you make more changes until the issues are resolved. I frequently have customers who want it to be a one step process. It can be, but usually takes multiple steps. Having said that, before we can fix them, we need to know what CRC errors are and why they occur. What Are CRC Errors? When Do they Occur? The simple answer is that CRC errors are damaged frames. The more complicated answer is that before a fibre-channel frame is sent, some math is done. The answer is added to the frame footer. When the receiver gets the frame, the receiver repeats the math. If the receiver gets a different answer then what's recorded in the frame, then the frame was changed in flight. This is a CRC error. The only time these happen is if the physical plant - cabling, SFPs is somehow...

IBM released a new Alert Policies feature for IBM Storage Insights Pro the first week of March 2019.    John Langlois does an excellent job introducing the new feature here: There are a few more advanced aspects of alert policies that John did not cover.    First, you can add and remove managed storage from Alert Policies from the Alerts Definitions of the storage system that you want to modify.  The following video shows how to do this. Second,  you must remember that if you add storage that has never been in an Alert Policy to an Alert Policy,  any existing alerts defined on that storage are lost and cannot be retrieved.  The following video shows an example managing of this and shows a workaround to preserve those alerts if you want to re-apply them at some point in the future.  

Cisco released a feature in NX-OS v8.3.1 called Automatic Zoning.  The feature does exactly what the name suggests:  it automatically configures zoning for the devices on your SAN.  You can see a video on the feature here: What Is Zoning? SAN (Storage Area Network) zoning is specifying which devices on the SAN  can communicate with which other devices.  Devices are added to a zone.  A zone is a group of devices that can communicate.  Zones are then added to a zoneset.  The zoneset is then activated - this is the configuration that is in effect. There can be multiple zonesets but only one active one at any given time.   By default, any device not zoned (not a member of a zone) cannot communicate with any other device.  A device that is in at least one zone is considered zoned.   Effective zoning prevents unauthorized devices from talking to each other, and minimizes disruptions on the SAN if a device misbehaves....

When I am working on performance problems, a frequent question I  get is why increasing buffer credits for a particular port is not a fix for a slow drain device attached to that port.  In this video, I explain the concept of congestion and illustrate why increasing the number of buffer credits is not a fix, without addressing the underlying cause of the congestion.   There are some exceptions to this rule.  The most common is when dealing with long-distance links, but that will be addressed in a future blog post (and perhaps a future video).   As always,  you can leave feedback in the comments, or find me on  LinkedIn  or  Twitter

Recently, there were enhancements made to several features, including a new Alert Policy feature in IBM Storage Insights Pro. You can find out what's new about the new features here.   The Alert Policy feature lets you configure a set of alerts into a policy and apply all of them across multiple storage systems. In this way you can ensure consistency with alerts and not have to define the same alert on each individual storage system. Once you define the alerts, IBM Storage Support representatives can see the generated alerts on a storage system. For the IBM FS9100, there are a number of alerts that are already defined. When one of those alerts is triggered,  a proactive ticket is opened and the experts at IBM Storage Support investigate the alert, then take whatever action is necessary.   With this post we'll take a look at how the IBM Storage Support Team investigates  alerts.  For this example we are using an alert for the Port Send Dela...