Home > Storage > Data Storage Essentials > Storage Admin > Fabric Notifications with Dell PowerMax > Key benefits of Fabric Notifications
Historically, SAN administrators were made aware of marginal link and or congestion events as a result of applications going down or experiencing poor performance. When this happens, customers will often escalate these as critical cases to their IT departments and Dell Support as application and or storage array performance issues. After receiving the call, Dell Support will typically check the storage array for issues and if no problems are found, they will investigate the SAN next. When investigating the SAN, additional information such as logs often need be collected. This data collection process consumes a considerable amount of time therefore extending the duration of the outage. Through earlier and more detailed notifications, Fabric Notifications help reduce the time needed to troubleshoot issues and lessens the impact they cause companies. These notifications include additional information useful for troubleshooting such as the event type like Link Integrity or Congestion as well as the Worldwide Port Names where the issue is occurring. For complex SAN issues, the added information allows storage administrators and Dell Support to quickly rule out the storage as the cause. Because of this, the SAN can be immediately investigated, and the Worldwide Port Names in the Fabric Notification can be used to locate the problem. Fabric Notifications can also be received before applications are severely impacted, thus providing administrators the ability to resolve the issue before effects can be felt by end users.
Finally, automation can be used to remediate the issue without intervention by the administrator or Dell Support. For example, MPIO and PowerPath already fail over to alternate paths on receipt of link integrity notifications. In the future, customers could possibly create scripts that set PowerMax host bandwidth limits on receipt of congestion notifications.