Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.

Varghese Kallarackal

Ramkumar Vadivelu

Vinodh Ravindran

Krishnakumar Gowravaram

Sathish Kumar Gnanasekaran

Badrinath Kollu

A diagnostic testing utility is used to perform online path diagnostic tests to troubleshoot components in a path that contribute to performance degradations and check application level data integrity, while traffic is allowed to flow as normal. To perform the diagnostic tests, two HBA or CNA ports at each end of a path are identified and used to send test frames to perform the diagnostic tests. The entire diagnostic procedure is performed without taking any ports or servers offline.

SAN fabric online path diagnostics

Specially configured host bus adaptors (HBAs) are located in the switches in the fabric or added to a management server. The HBAs are programmed to perform higher level protocol analysis, such as monitoring exchanges, LUNs, and VM/LUN/LBA ranges and developing SCSI statistics on the flows. The HBA can detect protocol exceptions. When located in the switches, mirroring of the desired frames is simplified as all routing is handled internally to the switch, with the HBA/switch combination providing data over the management Ethernet port to a management server. To maintain performance, preferably only the protocol relevant frames are mirrored to the HBAs. With the data provided from the HBAs, in conjunction with the normal diagnostic and statistics data available from the switch itself, the management server can correlate events end-to-end, correlate I/O error statistics collected from the fabric with server statistics, and correlate performance statistics collected from the fabric with server statistics.

Growing community of inventors

Sunnyvale, CA, United States of America

Varghese Kallarackal