Brass Tacks

Connectivity Changes for October

In my previous post I wrote about documentation and how it can make your life miserable when it’s missing, or worse, inadequate.  Oddly enough, the opposite is also true!  Having too much documentation, especially when you are looking for a specific piece of information, can also make your life miserable… 

For example, let’s say that you want to know when native FCoE support is going to be released for the EMC CLARiiON Storage Array or when the E-Lab connectivity team will be finished testing EOS 9.09.08 firmware.  Today you’d have no choice but to periodically check the EMC Support Matrix (ESM) or the E-Lab Navigator.  The obvious problem with this approach is that it is time consuming and requires some action on your part.  This usually isn’t a big deal since you will have to consult the ESM to find out exactly what configurations are supported anyway.  However, instead of periodically checking the ESM to look for changes, wouldn’t it be nice to get an automatic notification whenever something changes? 

I think it would… 

As a result, I’m going to start providing connectivity related updates on a monthly basis.  These “connectivity updates” will be posted as soon as possible after the publication of the ESM.  The updates will only deal with connectivity related items such as FC/FCoE switch firmware revisions, new features / topologies and updates to our documentation.  It’s important to note that I am not planning on providing updates that are host platform, OS or driver specific.  Also, I’m only going to provide a summary, so you’ll still need to read the release notes and check E-Lab navigator for the details.  However, at least you’ll know something has changed or become available and that you may want to review the appropriate documentation.

With this objective in mind, the connectivity updates for the month of October are listed below:

Native FCoE

Native FCoE support for CLARiiON

• The models listed in the ESM are the CX4-120FCoE, CX4-240FCoE, CX4-480FCoE and CX4-960FCoE
• Support for FCoE requires at least 2 FCoE 10GbE SLICs and Release 30+
• Maximum of two SLICs in CX4-120 and CX4-240
• Maximum of four SLICs in CX4-480 and CX4-960
• The supported Operating Systems consist of Windows, Linux and ESX 

 

Brocade (Courtesy of Aditya Nadkarni)

Firmware changes in the October ESM:

• Brocade M-series (Legacy McDATA) EOS firmware version 9.09.08
• FOS version v6.3.2a
• FC-SW Interop support added between v6.4.0b and EOS 9.09.05 / 9.09.08
• FC-SW Interop support added between v6.4.0b and NX-OS 5.0.1a.

Hardware changes in the October ESM:

• Two new NPIV gateways added
  1. HP 8Gb Virtual Connect FC module (572018-B21)
  2. Dell 8Gb Brocade Access Gateway (only) module (M5424-n)

 

Cisco

Firmware changes in the October ESM:

• NX-OS version 4.2(1)N2(1)

 

FCoE tech book

Nexus 5000 / 2232

• Nexus 2232PP overview section added
• Nexus 5000 / 2232 reference topology and setup steps added

Brocade 8000 (Courtesy of Erik Paine)

• Setup steps for configuring Access Gateway mode on the 8000 added

Getting down to Brass Tacks (well almost…)

OK, I’ve finally decided to take the plunge and start a blog on Storage Area Networks.  Why now?  Well…thanks to things like FCoE, there’s a lot going on and a ton of new things to learn.  I figure as I’m learning and figuring out what makes sense in our lab, I’d share some of those experiences and maybe make someone else’s life easier. 

 

To give you a bit of an idea of whom I am, I’ve been working with Fibre Channel in various capacities over the past 11 years for EMC.  I started with the “Stampede” product line, now known as “Connectrix”, and my first job was to make sure the “dial home” server didn’t hang from all of the McDATA ED-1032 dial homes.  After that, I spent a brief amount of time in the PSE lab before joining level 2 Tech Support as a member of the ESN (Enterprise Storage Network) team.  From there it was off to E-Lab and I’ve been there for the past 7 years. 

 

In E-Lab, as a member of the IOP team, my first set of responsibilities was to qualify new McDATA firmware and hardware.  Since then I’ve helped to re-write the EMC Networked Storage Topology Guide, co-authored two EMC Tech books (SAN concepts and Protocols and the FCoE Tech book), presented at EMC world a handful of times and joined T11 as one of EMC’s Alternates.

 

Along the way I’ve made probably every mistake you can imagine and all indications are I will continue this tradition going forward!  Sometimes the root cause for a mistake is a simple case of PEBKAC (problem exists between keyboard and chair) but more frequently I find that documentation is to blame.  This is one of the reasons why like participating in the creation and re-writing of documentation.  I know the pain of trying to figure something out using poor documentation. 

 

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to focus on the some of the new improvements we are making to the Networked Storage Topology Guide as well as the Nexus 5000 / Nexus 2232 configuration we just added to the October release.  After that I’m planning to discuss our experiences with vPC and provide an update to the proposals that we are working on in T11.  Things a still a bit up in the air but that’s the plan anyway… 

 

Thanks for reading!

 

Erik