Storage Networking

9 posts

NVMe and NVMe-oF 101 with SNIA: queues everywhere!

SNIA dictionaryDr. J. Metz talked with us about NVMe at Storage Field Day 16 in Boston. NVMe is rapidly becoming one of the new hypes in the storage infrastructure market. A few years ago, everything was cloud. Vendors now go out of their way to mention their array contains NVMe storage, or is at the very least ready for it. So should you care? And if so, why?

SNIA’s mission is to lead the storage industry worldwide in developing and promoting vendor-neutral architectures, standards and educational services that facilitate the efficient management, movement, and security of information. They do that in a number of ways: standards development and adoption for one, but also through interoperability testing (a.k.a. plugfest). They aim to help in technology acceleration and promotion: solving current problems with new technologies. So NVMe-oF fits this mission well: it’s a relatively new technology, and it can solve some of the queuing problems we’re seeing in storage nowadays. Let’s dive in!

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Safely replace an Isilon InfiniBand Switch with these steps

Isilon Infiniband switch 8 port MellanoxEvery once in a while you might need to replace an Isilon infiniband switch. Possibly because of a broken switch, the need for more ports, or because the old switch is.. too old. Good news: it’s a fairly straightforward job.  And if your cluster has two switches, you can replace a switch at a time without outage.

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VNX Unified standby data mover interface suspended after Cisco NX-OS upgrade

We’re in the midst of a VCE vBlock 340 software upgrade. Part of this upgrade process is upgrading the Cisco Nexus 5K switches that connect the blades and storage to the customer network. After upgrading the switch we suddenly noticed on the switch that the VNX Unified standby data mover (server_3) interface suspended with a “no LACP PDUs” error message. A quick check on the switch that wasn’t upgraded yet showed that interface to be online. So what’s up with that?

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Intel SPDK and NVMe-oF will accelerate NVMe adoption rates

Intel logoOnce upon a time there was a data center filled with racks of physical servers. Thanks to hypervisors such as VMware ESX it was possible to virtualize these systems and run them as virtual machines, using less hardware. This had a lot of advantages in terms of compute efficiency, ease of management and deployment/DR agility.

To enable many of the hypervisor features such as VMotion, HA and DRS, the data of the virtual machine had to be located on a shared storage system. This had an extra benefit: it’s easier to hand out pieces of a big pool of shared storage, than to predict capacity requirements for 100’s of individual servers. Some servers might need a lot of capacity (file servers), some might need just enough for an OS and maybe a web server application. This meant that the move to centralized storage was also beneficial from a capacity allocation perspective.

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Brocade firmware upgrade via the CLI

Brocade DS-300BA Brocade firmware upgrade once in a while is highly recommended: new releases usually squash bugs and add new features, which helps with a stable and efficient SAN infrastructure. The upgrade process itself is relatively straightforward if you keep in mind that you can only non-disruptively upgrade one major release at a time. With that knowledge you only need a FTP server (like Filezilla), SSH client (PuTTY), the upgrade packages and some patience.

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