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Being able to quickly identify, isolate, and resolve issues impacting data flow is vital to maintaining the performance and reliability of the SAN. The excessive amount of time required to manually analyze and troubleshoot these SAN problems can result in lost revenue, extended downtime, and subpar service. The sheer scale of today’s data centers makes this especially challenging. Prior to the introduction of Fabric Notifications, Fibre Channel provided almost no features that would allow an administrator (or a Fibre Channel switch operating system) to proactively identify problematic data flows and then either:
Without Fabric Notifications, the first problem notification a SAN administrator might get in the SAN could be a fabric-wide outage. SAN administrators often resort to "heavy-handed" strategies such as resetting ports when credits are stuck. Modifying fabric designs requires exceeding or allocating additional bandwidth to manage oversubscription. Approaches such as these address the symptoms without truly resolving the underlying issues.
To address these issues, the INCITS/Fibre Channel (T11) Technical Committee adopted a set of standards providing the framework for Fabric Notifications. Fabric Notifications were developed to create a standard mechanism that could be used by switches and end-devices to communicate information about the overall status of the SAN. Products that support Fabric Notifications span storage, switch, host bus adapter (HBA), operating systems and multi-pathing software.
Fabric Notifications address two important areas: logging and automation. When a link integrity or congestion event is detected, Fabric Notifications are sent to end-devices that have registered for these messages. By just logging these events, the troubleshooting process can be greatly enhanced. This is because these messages contain information about the type of event and the SAN ports involved. These details help quickly isolate the fault and determine the root cause for the issue. Benefits to customers include:
Automation is another key benefit enabled by Fabric Notifications. For example:
These are just two examples of the types of automated remediations that Fabric Notifications enable today. Many more are possible and are being investigated by Dell.