Cisco Smart Zoning greatly reduces the time needed to zone servers to storage on Cisco NX-OS SAN switches. Instead of creating numerous zones that contain one single initiator and one single target, you can now classify a WWN as initiator, target or both and throw them all into one single zone. The switch then figures out which devices should be allowed to talk with each other (based on the parameter you set for each WWN). Not only does this speed up the entire zoning process but it also helps keep the zoning interface uncluttered and minimize the risk for errors. Let’s see how you can configure this in the DCNM-SAN GUI…
zoning
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Recently I ran into an environment with a couple of VNX5700 systems that were attached to the front-end SAN switches with only two ports per storage processor. The customer was complaining: performance was OK most of the time but at some times during the day the performance was noticeably lower. Analysis revealed that the back-end was coping well with the workload (30-50% load on the disks and storage processors). The front-end ports were a bit (over)loaded and spewing QFULL errors. Time to cable in some extra ports and to rebalance the existing hosts over the new storage paths!
