Latest best practices for optical fiber Switches

Analysis of Optical Switch practice process

Once a product supplier is determined, do not change it easily, because mixing products of multiple brands can easily lead to problems. Whether fiber switches can communicate normally is a key factor to ensure the stability of the entire network. Gartner analyst Robert Passmore said: there are standards for communication between fiber switches, but it is far from enough to meet this standards. This can be basically done by all vendors.

The following experiences apply to all optical fiber exchange environments:

Latest best practices for optical fiber switches-plan

Plan the Storage Area Network in the next three years. Determine future requirements based on the number of applications, physical servers, and storage devices in the past two years. Whether new technologies, such as virtual servers, will affect the entire network, and whether different components are used must be considered.

Marc Staimer, president of Dragon Slayer Consulting, said: "You will double your needs in the next three years to deploy your applications. Although it takes a lot of time, however, in the long run, it seems very worthwhile. You can deploy a network in the storage area without planning, and more problems will arise in the future. Therefore, the more you plan, the easier it will be to work in the future ."

A cost-effective storage zone network is designed based on the Application throughput and I/O. Dan Iacono, a former storage engineer at HP, said: "Many users do not know the bandwidth and I/O of their applications. This problem can be solved using some operating systems such as Unix, many storage device vendors will also provide this tool to customers. Determine the port used based on the throughput and how to design the storage area network. Many users use the center + edge mode. On the edge, they use a 16-port or 32-port optical fiber switch, and then use the internal ISL to link to a large switch in the center. Knowing the throughput of edge switches can determine the number of ISL ."

The number of ISL can be minimized, more ports can be idle, and more funds can be used to deploy the storage area network. Experienced companies will find that simply moving applications with high throughput from the edge to the center can solve the problem, because this makes it easier for applications to retrieve data from storage devices.

Do not be afraid of exceeding the limit. The optical fiber switch does not run at full load most of the time, So adding additional load will not affect the overall performance. Howard Goldstein, chairman of the Howard Goldstein Association, said: "Most storage administrators are too conservative on this issue. In fact, they usually use only 1/10 of the total bandwidth ".

Consider power consumption and cooling equipment in advance. Suppliers usually refine their products as much as possible, but sometimes it is not enough. Power consumption is an example. Mario Blandini, product marketing director of the Infrastructure Department of brocade data center, said: "Many IT environments are currently lacking power supply equipment. Most hospitals or university buildings were built 75 years ago, at that time, when they were connected to the power supply, they certainly did not expect that 10,000 (W) of power would be consumed in 19 square feet."

Design two independent storage area networks for redundancy. It takes 7 × 24 hours for the SAN to run properly. The more servers the Storage Area Network has, the higher the chance of failure. To avoid faults, there are usually two paths between the server and storage.

If any part in a path has a problem, such as HBA, fiber switch, cable, port, or other parts, the other path will replace the faulty path, link the server to the storage. Another benefit is that the SAN can be upgraded during operation. "No matter what you do to the system, it will affect your applications. To avoid this, we usually upgrade non-Running Environments. Multiple optical fiber networks can make SAN more secure ."

Latest best practices for optical fiber switches-Technical Management

The automatic path switch software can be deployed to ensure that when one path fails, the other can automatically switch without affecting normal use. Passmore said: "Some operating systems provide such software, but the function is limited. Therefore, some manufacturers will release their respective path management software. Although the price is relatively high, however, the functions provided are comprehensive and value-for-money."

Configure, debug, and monitor hardware and Performance Tools. Iacono remembers that a large consulting company will receive more than 6,000 warnings every day, but does not handle them. One device vendor canceled the warning setting when the SAN bandwidth was 0 Mbps. This will cause a lot of trouble.

Usually a small number of hardware problems will increase. About 95% of SAN problems will be warned, but such warnings are not taken seriously. If you receive a lot of warning messages every day, you should re-Debug your monitoring tool to cancel these warnings, or the problem is really serious and needs to be resolved immediately.

Back up SAN information to the hard disk instead of the SAN. SAN usually does not go down. Once it goes down, it will be a disaster. If SAN information is stored in a SAN-linked hard disk, the data recovery is difficult. Iacono said: "I am sure the Fortune 500 companies are doing this ."

Many companies do not even update documents. They usually only use an Excel document and write some goals in it. They will rarely update it in the future, because they do not think this is important. If fault analysis is required, they do not know what devices are connected to each port. In fact, each administrator has his/her own documents, but 50% to 70% of the information is not up-to-date.

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