DATA CENTER Operational Simplicity: Automating and Simplifying SAN Provisioning The network matters for storage. This paper discusses key server and storage trends and technology advancements and explains how Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel and Brocade Fabric Vision technology delivers the performance, reliability, and simplicity needed to meet the new requirements of today’s data center.
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................................................... 3 OPERATIONAL SIMPLICITY ........................................................................................................................... 3 Infrastructure Validation and Diagnostics .............................................................................................. 4 Validating Optics and Cables...
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF INTRODUCTION As customers look to Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (FC SANs) for building private storage cloud services for their enterprise data centers, some of the key requirements are: • Consolidated and highly virtualized pools of compute, storage, and network resources • Secure and efficient use of inter-fabric connectivity • Lower capital and operational costs, higher asset utilization • On-demand and efficient provisioning of application resources through automated
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF Based on customer need for automated diagnostics, monitoring, and management capabilities, Brocade has developed innovative solutions in several areas: • Automated validation of physical infrastructure connectivity • Automated validation of SAN fabric performance and robustness • Automated configuration of fabric-wide, threshold-based rules and policies for proactive monitoring and alerting • Automated provisioning and administration of zone management • At-a-glance dashboard v
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF Test Benefit Link Performance Generates traffic patterns similar to the projected traffic patterns over links of the new fabric to ensure that it meets performance requirements and detects potential congestion points Transceiver Health Check Validates that all electrical and optical components of the transceiver are working as designed and that the decibel budget between the links is within tolerance Transceiver Uptime Proactively monitors and trends for the integrity of
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF ASIC RX RX TX RX TX 16 Gbps SFPs 16 Gbps SFPs TX TX RX Electrical Loopback Optical Loopback List Distance/Saturation RX RX ASIC TX fig02_D-Port-diagnos TX Figure 2. ClearLink D_Port to D_Port diagnostics. In Figure 3, Brocade Network Advisor displays ClearLink D_Port test results for six ISLs where two ports succeeded, two ports failed the optical component of the test, and two ports are still in progress. Figure 3.
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF Validating SAN Robustness and Performance Validating the physical infrastructure is a good first step to ensure maximum availability, but users also need to know if the SAN will deliver the required performance.
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF Source Device Destination Device LUN1 LUN2 fig05_Operational_Simplicity_v2 Flow Direction Figure 5. Uni-directional flow from a single host to multiple LUNs. Threshold-Based Monitoring and Alerting As SAN infrastructures continue to grow in size and complexity, proactive monitoring of the health and performance of the SAN becomes critical.
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF to high priority applications and another group of switch ports attached to low priority applications—and monitor each group according to its own unique rules. MAPS also supports multiple alerting mechanisms, including RASlog messages, SNMP traps, email notifications, as well as port fencing when errors exceed the specified threshold.
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF What Do Customers Do Now? Defining, adding, or changing a zone database for device connectivity is currently a very manual process. In cases where the HBAs fail or servers come off lease, the zone database must be updated to accurately reflect the changes in the fabric.
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF 16 Gbps SAN Core fig04_Operational_Simplicity 16 Gbps SAN Edge Figure 6. ClearLink infrastructure validation. If the data centers are interconnected over dark fiber for workload migration and replication, assessing the distance and latency tolerance becomes critical for maintaining application uptime. SAN administrators can now use ClearLink diagnostics to measure the latency and cable distance to a granularity of 16.
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF Configuring for Threshold-based Monitoring Prior to deploying the SAN into production, administrators can take advantage of MAPS to set up and enable threshold-based rules and policies for proactive monitoring and alerting. Customers currently using Brocade Fabric Watch can automatically import existing thresholds into a MAPS policy, enabling seamless migration from Fabric Watch to MAPS.
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF Verifying Disruptive Links After a SAN has been deployed into production, during the operational life cycle of the fabric, links may begin to exhibit CRC errors or increased latency due to misconfigurations or other problems (see Figure 5). The relevant ports can be taken offline (red link) and put into ClearLink D_Port mode without disrupting the fabric, if there are additional connections between the switches to route traffic.
DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF Create zones using FA-WWN1 instead of physical WWN of the server. Fabric assigns FA-WWN1 to Server 1 during enhanced fabric login process. Create LUN mapping using FA-WWN1. T1, pWWN1 FA-WWN1 Server uses Brocade HBA configured to use FA-WWN. When Server 1 is replaced with Server 2, fabric assigns FA-WWN1 to Server 2 during enhanced fabric login process. No change to existing zones. No change to LUN mapping or masking at target.
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