Greetings from wales :) I don't normally comment on videos, but your video is brilliant. I'm a techie (14 years strong in the industry) but a little lacking on the FC side, what a brilliant video, technical enough to be extensive, but not too much.
Awesome video! The explanation is crystal clear. I'm a network tech and just got introduced to FC. I can see a lot of parallels with TCP/IP. I find it fascinating how it seems to have merged transport and routing into a single protocol using unique identifiers. Great stuff!
Forget good video .. in my opinion, this is a GREAT instructional video that is well broken down and easy to understand. Work at a storage company as a contractor at the moment and have an internal interview in 30 mins for a full time position. This is great! Post more storage videos if you can. Cheers!
Nice video. You seem to hit the right level of information, coupled with a presentation speed that worked for me. I watch a lot of technical videos and too many times I give up on a video because they either get to far down in the weeds when it isn't necessary or they are too slow to get the information I want and I get distracted and lose interest. Good job.
Great video, very informative and educational! A couple of questions: 1) Why did you use redundant switches in the FC fabric? Wouldn't 1 switch in each fibre channel network suffice for redundancy? 2) If you were to increase the number of host/controller FC ports to 4, could you run networks A&C on one switch and B&D on the other assuming you correctly configured your zones for each switch? 3) If the storage controllers are in active-active, is ALUA able to utilize all 4 paths? (in your example) Thanks in advanced, subscribed, and again a very informative and helpful video!
Can you go into the comparison between TCP and FC protocols a little further? Just saying 'its built into the protocol that FC never loses data' is not really useful. Maybe you're saying that FC ensures data integrity at the data-link layer or the network layer instead of at the transport layer?
Hi thedanyes, for lower level detail of how Fibre Channel is lossless beyond the scope of an Overview video you can Google for 'how is Fibre Channel lossless' and find several great articles. HTH, Neil
Very useful, thanks! A couple of queries, if you don't mind :-) i) how are non-optimised paths 3 & 4 from Server 1 to LUN-S1 (@26:08) actually paths at all, when they both go to CTRL2, which isn't connected to LUN-S1? ii) You state (@13:37) that the host's FCID is made up of the switch's domain ID and port number, but in the next screen @13:43), NETAPP-CTRL1 is connected to port 8 of FC-Switch-2 but has an FCID of 0xcf2000, and SERVER1 is connected to port 5 of FC-Switch-2 but has an FCID of 0xef1000. Neither of those FCIDs seem to have a relationship with their respective port numbers; am I missing something here? Thanks in advance!
i) The controllers have a separate connection to each other which gives connectivity to LUNs on different controllers. ii) 0xcf2000 is a made up address as an example. HTH, Neil
Can someone please answer me. Do the interfaces in the FC switch have FCIDs ?? Like how router interfaces have IPs.. Or are FCID only associated with servers and storage nodes ??
Question: At 25:00 you show a diagram where Server 1 has different paths through the fibre channel to get to LUN-S1 but if CTRL1 loses power, what good is it for Server 1 that it can reach CTRL 2 when CTRL 2 can't provide the LUN-S1 that Server 1 needs? Is it possible for CTRL 1 and CTRL 2 to somehow synchronize and provide redundancy for each other?
Hi Strandvaskeren, sorry for the delay in reply. Yes CTRL 1 and CTRL 2 are configured as a High Availability pair, they have connections to each others disk shelves. HTH, Neil
Hi Gregory, yes it can but it's not a scalable solution - you'd need a separate physical port on your storage for every server (2 ports for redundancy). HTH, Neil
Hi Games Player, if a path goes down then the client will fail over to the best alternative path. If Fabric A goes down, the path via Fabric B is still available, and vice versa. HTH, Neil
Thanks for the feedback! I'm sure there's some 3 minute sales and marketing style videos on Fibre Channel here which may be what you're looking for. This is a 30 minute video aimed at IT engineers who want a solid technical overview of how Fibre Channel works.
Thanks for your reply, please try to understand that there are many books which have long and solid information but what I mean to said that the videos must be with the practical demonstration about the subject. Do you have any video in which you have practically demonstrated in real time? How to configure with step by step the SAN configuration and with trouble shooting steps or even just the configuration? If you have please let me know and one thing please also note that no pilot can be a real pilot even if he just reads hundred of books until he flies the airplane in real time, thanks again.
Yep, please take a look at my courses at learn.flackbox.com for dozens of lab demos. Could you let me know where I can find your videos too please? Will check them out and give you feedback. Thanks, Neil
