Storage Area Networks

[13-Aug-2007]
Recommended and supported Storage:   The storage guys at HP have just released a matrix showing the supported and recommended storage for Integrity servers. Definitely worth bookmarking. (22 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[17-Feb-2006]
Confirmation of issue with SAN switch firmware:   If you've been following along, we have been experiencing fibrechannel path problems here after upgrading Brocade switch firmware. After a huge roundabout investigation by HP and Brocade, it has finally been acknowledged that the version of the SAN switch firmware we upgraded to has a problem. Of course, I guessed that back in December. (154 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[25-Jan-2006]
EVA 8000 goes live:   We went live on the EVA 8000 last night. This had been delayed significantly due to our ongoing SAN issues. I have always suspected that the path issue is related to the version of firmware running on the 3200 SAN switches. As this is the minimum version required to support the EVA 8000, I was considerably worried about going live and then being told by HP that we would have to down-rev the switch firmware, leaving the EVA in an unsupported configuration. With the implementation of the 4GB switches on the weekend, if HP plays the down-rev card, I can move the EVA off the 2GBs to the 4GBs and avoid the unsupported configuration. (115 words, 1 comments, 0 pings)

[22-Jan-2006]
4GB SAN switches:   The amount of storage has once more exceeded the number of ports I had on the edge of the SAN, so today I replaced the four 2GB switches that made up the cores of the two fabrics with four 4GB switches. The 2GB switches then became new edge switches, giving us another 28 ports on the edge. (216 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[27-Dec-2005]
Update on SAN issues:   The SAN issues we've been having have been narrowed down to either the HBA firmware or a problem within OpenVMS itself. (82 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[18-Dec-2005]
SAN problems:   I've been a little quiet on the blog here of late as we have been struggling with a number of problems, the first of which appears to be a firmware interaction issue on our SAN. (529 words, 4 comments, 0 pings)

[22-Nov-2005]
DLT cleaning lights:   Jim struggles with reading the SCSI specification to determine if a tape's cleaning light it on or off. (237 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[31-Oct-2005]
EVA 8000 fired up:   While I was in Orlando a couple of weeks ago, our new EVA 8000 arrived. Some of the guys got it on the floor, and I had previously arranged power and connectivity for it. This morning, we installed Comand View EVA on the management appliance, plugged it in, and fired it up. (268 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[12-Oct-2005]
ACS 8.8-2:   Last week we received a letter from HP concerning a significant bug in ACS 8.8-2. The bug could cause data corruption on the addition or removal of a member from a mirrorset (i.e., RAID1 or RAID 0+1). The letter was a tad vague about what addition or removal meant. I asked Engineering and was told it was both manually issuing the command to the controller, or the controller failing a disk out and pulling in a spare. Yikes. As we have terabytes of critical production data on mirrorsets, we were keen to get the latest patch on, and as of tonight, we are now running ACS 8.8-4. (107 words, 0 comments, 0 pings)

[26-Aug-2005]
Detecting the dreaded QFUL:   I run this command procedure regularly to detect the dreaded QFUL condition on HSG80 controllers. $ say := write sys$output... (269 words, 2 comments, 0 pings)

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