Category Archives: SAN / WAN - Page 6

Migrating hosts to new storage ports, LIVE

Posted by on July 1, 2013 No comments

Migrating hosts to new storage ports, LIVE!

Many SAN administrators will face this challenge from time to time: certain hosts need to start using new storage ports. Reasons vary, but in the EMC Clariion/VNX world this might happen because it’s decided to dedicate the mirrorview ports to mirrorview only instead of allowing hosts to use these ports as well. Obviously having dedicated replication ports will improve replication performance and for synchronous replication this will also improve the production host performance since the write acknowledgement from the remote array will be quicker and the extra latency is limited to a minimum.
So you end up wanting to free the SPA1 and SPB1 ports (most Clarrions) or SPA0 and SPB0 (VNX). But disalowing hosts to use these ports means they will loose access to these paths. This just might be disruptive! Or not?

There’s a way to migrate nondisruptively!

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EMC SAN Copy best practices

Posted by on June 12, 2013 1 comment

SAN Copy zoningEMC SAN Copy best practices

  • Just like with MirrorView ports: don’t use SC ports as host front end ports. Try to use dedicated ports for SC
  • Make sure the zoning is correct between the source SAN Copy port and the target SAN Copy port
  • Don’t use zones with multiple storage array (initiator) ports in them. Try to use SIST whenever you can: Single Initiator, Single Target so you’re certain there can only be 1 initiator in each zone

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Fibre Channel Routing: EMC Ask the Expert on ECN

Posted by on April 16, 2013 No comments

Fibre Channel Routing

From Monday April the 15th to May 1st 2013 EMC is hosting yet another “Ask the Expert” discussion on ECN. This time it’s about Fibre Channel Routing.

What is it, what’s it used for and how do you know if you want it?

Take a look at the discussion and join me and my friends Allen Ward and Mr Dynamox on ECN!

And although we close the topic on May 1st, we’ll wrap up LIVE from EMC World in Las Vegas in the EMC Elect corner! So if you’re there from May 6 to May 9, make sure to look out for us. As far as I know the Elect corner will be next to the Blogger’s area, close to the Pavillion.

The importance of keeping fibers clean

Posted by on March 12, 2013 1 comment

Fiber patch cables seem to be very forgiving, when light shines through everything is great and everybody’s happy, right? Wrong!!!
You shouldn’t underestimate the importance of keeping the ends of patch cables and the SFPs clean, since the actual diameter of a fiber is either 9 or 50 (or even 62.5) mu (micron).

fiber

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Discussing the challenges of Long Distance Links

Posted by on November 20, 2012 No comments

On ECN (EMC Community Network) together with Jon Klaus, a colleague of mine, I started a new “Ask the Expert” discussion about long distance links and the challenges you might be facing there. I would like to invite you to join the discussion there:

https://community.emc.com/message/690945

If you’d like to discuss anything here, you’re welcome to do so on ECN, but if you also like Twitter there’s a treat for you as we will be having a LIVE “TweetChat” on Monday November the 26th from 19:00-21:00 CET (1PM-3PM EST, 10AM-12AM PST). The URL you can use to filter out the discussion will be http://tweetchat.com/room/EMCATE.
An earlier anouncements about the TweetChat on Thursday the 22nd proved to be badly chosen because of Thanksgiving, a national holiday in the USA. We didn’t see this coming. Our appologies. I will be online on Thursday the 22nd anyway to welcome anyone who didn’t see the new anouncement.

Let’s join the discussion!