The first law of the Time Lords | Aussie Storage Blog

A buddy of mine posted this article and it reminded me of the presentation I did for the Melbourne VMUG back in April of this year.

The first law of the Time Lords | Aussie Storage Blog:

If you have ever worked in support (or had the need to check on events in general as an administrator) you know how important it is to have an accurate timestamp. Incorrect clock settings are a nightmare if you want to correlate event that are logged on different times and dates.

ViPR – Frankenstorage Revisited | Architecting IT

Fellow blogger and keen dissector of fluff Chris Evans really hit the nail on the head with this one.

ViPR – Frankenstorage Revisited | Architecting IT:

Even after reading the announcement from EMC a couple of times I really struggle with finding out what is actually announced. It looks like they crammed every existing technology available in the storage-world and overlay that with every other piece of existing technology in the storage world.

ipSpace.net: FCoE between data centers? Forget it!

Cisco guru and long time networking expert Ivan Pepelnjak  hits the nail on its head with the below post. It is one more addition to my series of why you should stay away from FCoE. FCoE is only good for ONE thing: to stay confined in the space of the Cisco UCS platform where Cisco seems to obtain some benefits.

Surprise: Cisco is back on the FC market

The Cisco MDS 9506,9509 and 9513 series director class FC switches have been in for the long haul. They were brought to market back in the early 2000's (2003 to be exact) and have run a separate code-base from the rest of the Cisco switching family in the form of the Catalyst Ethernet switches. The storage and Ethernet side have always been a separate stream and for good reason. When Cisco opened up the can of worms with FCoE a few years back, they needed a platform which could serve both the Ethernet and fibre-channel side.

Brocade FOS 7.1 and the cool features

After a very busy couple of weeks I've spent some time to dissect the release notes of Brocade FOS 7.1 and I must say there are some really nice features in there but also some that I REALLY think should be removed right away.

Brocade and the "Woodstock Generation"

I encourage change especially if there are technological advances that improves functionality, reliability, availability and serviceability (or RAS in short). What I hate if these changes increase risk and require a fair chuck of organisational change even more if they amplify each other (like FCoE).

What I hate even more though is for marketing people to take ownership of an industry standard and try to re-brand it for their own purposes and this is why I'm absolutely flabbergasted about Brocades press-release in which they announce a "new" generation of the fibre-channel protocol.

A less known "host-can't-see-storage" problem caused by FC-SP authentication failures.

Many support-cases open with the line "Host can't see storage" which puts most of these cases in the "configuration" queue. My assumption is that if a host can't "see" storage it has never worked before so there must be some kind of config problem.

So once in a while you'll see a case popping up where a less used feature of the FC protocol is used and that is FC Authentication (part of the FC-SP protocol.) This piece of the FC stack allows for an authentication mechanism between two ports on a link or an end-to-end connection. 

The Emergency Health Threat (EHT) on Brocade FC fabrics

Since a couple of FOS versions ago Brocade wanted to fix the problem Fibre-Channel has by definition called credit back-pressure. The word "problem" overstated since in 99.99999% of all fabrics you'll never see this anyway.  As you know Fibre-Channel is a deterministic architected type of network which requires devices to behave properly. The chaos theory of Ethernet networks where flooding and broadcasts are more along the line of shoot the fly with a cannon doesn't apply to Fibre-Channel.

Big pat on the back

I already knew I was working with some extremely smart dudes here in HDS support but for this to be recognized by customers in an independent survey which more or less outlines that you outsmart the rest of the support industry is a great pat on the back.

The insanity of sanity. (or am I getting insane?)

What would you say if you were having the following discussion? 

"Help, I have a problem."
OK, so what is the problem? 
Something doesn't work.
Sorry, what doesn't work? 
I can't tell you, it's classified.
Can you send me the logs? 
Yes but I have to sanitise them.
Uhhmmm, so this means you're sending me incomplete logs? 
Yes, I have to remove all references to system names, IP addresses, WWN's, connection diagrams and everything else that might in the smallest way lead to identification of a system or process.
So basically you can only send me information that has events in them?
Uhmm, yes.
But these cannot tell me anything
Uhmm, yes
So how am I supposed to help you?
By fixing my problem.