HP DC SAN Backbone Director Switch Hardware Reference Guide (5697-2158, August 2012)

High availability
The following features contribute to the DC SAN Director high-availability design:
• Redundant, hot-swappable blades and FRUs
• Enhanced data integrity on all data paths
• FSPF re-routing around failed links
• Integration with SNMP managers
• Automatic CP failover
• Nondisruptive hot software code loads and activation
• Easy configuration, save, and restore
• Hot-swappable WWN cards
The high-availability software architecture of the DC SAN Director provides a common framework
for all applications that reside on the system, allowing global and local states to be maintained
through any component failure. High-availability elements consist of the High Availability Manager,
heartbeat, fault/health framework, replicated database, initialization, and software upgrade.
The High Availability Manager controls access to the standby CP blade, facilitates software
upgrades, prevents extraneous switchover activity, closes and flushes streams, provides flow control
and message buffering, and supports a centralized active and standby state.
Reliability
The DC SAN Director uses the following error detection and correction mechanisms to ensure
reliability of data:
• Data is protected by the Error Detection and Correction mechanism, which checks for EDFI,
such as CRC, parity checking, checksum, and illegal address checking.
• POST
• Dual CP Blades that enable hot, nondisruptive fast firmware upgrades
• Each CP Blade contains one serial port and two Ethernet ports for management and for service.
Offline CP Blade diagnostics and remote diagnostics simplify troubleshooting. The standby
CP Blade monitors diagnostics to ensure it is operational, in case a failover is required.
• Bus monitoring and control of blades and other FRUs
Serviceability
The DC SAN Director provides the following features to enhance and ensure serviceability:
• Modular design with hot-swappable components
• Flash memory that stores two firmware images per CP Blade
• USB port on CP blades for all tasks that formerly required an FTP/SCP server, including
software and firmware upgrades
• NVRAM, containing the serial number, revision information, and part number information
• Background health-check daemon
• Memory scrubber, self test, and bus ping to determine if a bus is functioning
• RASlog messages
• SMI-S compliance
• Watchdog timers
• Status LEDs
12 DC SAN Director overview