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#1
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Rules of the Road for Fibre Channel Interop
Being relatively new to fibre channel, I need to gain more awareness of what
works and what to expect. Maybe some gurus here on usenet can help. I discovered that my Sun X6730A (FC100/S) card will not correctly communicate with a Clariion FC5700 DPER. I don't understand why. Doesn't everyone follow the ANSI standard for Fibre Channel? Is the standard kinda "loose" or what? I've seen a number of shops with large systems that had Fibre Channel cards from 2 or 3 different vendors talking to arrays from different vendors. I never really considered why. I think I'm beginning to get a clue about this. In my configuration I can see one device out on the Fibre Channel. It is identified as a DGC (Data General, creator of Clariion). This device has 3 LUN's available (yes, I already did the sd.conf). But any further communication beyond the format command to see available drives results in "SCSI transport failed: reason 'timeout': retrying command." It seems like connecting an FC100/S to a Clariion is like breaking the main law of Fibre Channel: Never expect interoperability between any two given devices. Is that true or am I just making some kind of configuration mistake with the drivers or the OS? Any help is appreciated. Charles McCane Dallas, TX. |
#2
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On Sun, 22 Feb 2004 09:18:22 -0600, news.directlink.net wrote:
Being relatively new to fibre channel, I need to gain more awareness of what works and what to expect. Maybe some gurus here on usenet can help. I discovered that my Sun X6730A (FC100/S) card will not correctly communicate with a Clariion FC5700 DPER. I don't understand why. Doesn't everyone follow the ANSI standard for Fibre Channel? Is the standard kinda "loose" or what? Some cards were released before the standards were formalized, but should be able to work with some tweaking. What does your topology look like? Do you have the latest drivers? I've seen a number of shops with large systems that had Fibre Channel cards from 2 or 3 different vendors talking to arrays from different vendors. I never really considered why. I think I'm beginning to get a clue about this. In my configuration I can see one device out on the Fibre Channel. It is identified as a DGC (Data General, creator of Clariion). This device has 3 LUN's available (yes, I already did the sd.conf). But any further communication beyond the format command to see available drives results in "SCSI transport failed: reason 'timeout': retrying command." It seems like connecting an FC100/S to a Clariion is like breaking the main law of Fibre Channel: Never expect interoperability between any two given devices. Is that true or am I just making some kind of configuration mistake with the drivers or the OS? Any help is Do you have a switch between the host and the Clarion? What happens when you run a read/analyze on the LUN through format? Did you label the LUN through format? We have used Emulex cards w/ the Clarion line and have had great luck. appreciated. Charles McCane Dallas, TX. |
#3
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Thanks for the response. Topology is FC-AL, very simple at this point - one
initiator (Sun) and one target (Clariion). As for latest drivers, I'm using Solaris 8 with the latest jumbo patch. I haven't researched the possibility of doing something with the firmware for the FC100/S. That HBA has been working flawlessly with a 3rd party JBOD enclosure consisting of 8 IBM DDYF-18350 10K rpm drives. Never had any issues with that configuration - all the drives show up under format and provide decent performance as configured under Veritas 3.2 with striping. I'm using a different boot disk with a simple Solaris 8 install for testing - no Veritas on the test boot disk. When I remvoe the JBOD, connect the Clariion, and boot from the test boot disk, I can see the DGC-RAID10-0511 target on the loop. With a reconfigure the OS manages to create /dev/dsk/c1t0d0s0-7 device files. Format shows the DGC device and I can go into partition and see the partition table. It shows an 82G device. The problem comes when I do any kind of write, which as you pointed out would first be a label command. Thats when I get the "SCSI transport failed: reason 'timeout': retrying command." response showing up in var/messages. I've never been any further than that. "Matty" wrote in message news On Sun, 22 Feb 2004 09:18:22 -0600, news.directlink.net wrote: Being relatively new to fibre channel, I need to gain more awareness of what works and what to expect. Maybe some gurus here on usenet can help. I discovered that my Sun X6730A (FC100/S) card will not correctly communicate with a Clariion FC5700 DPER. I don't understand why. Doesn't everyone follow the ANSI standard for Fibre Channel? Is the standard kinda "loose" or what? Some cards were released before the standards were formalized, but should be able to work with some tweaking. What does your topology look like? Do you have the latest drivers? I've seen a number of shops with large systems that had Fibre Channel cards from 2 or 3 different vendors talking to arrays from different vendors. I never really considered why. I think I'm beginning to get a clue about this. In my configuration I can see one device out on the Fibre Channel. It is identified as a DGC (Data General, creator of Clariion). This device has 3 LUN's available (yes, I already did the sd.conf). But any further communication beyond the format command to see available drives results in "SCSI transport failed: reason 'timeout': retrying command." It seems like connecting an FC100/S to a Clariion is like breaking the main law of Fibre Channel: Never expect interoperability between any two given devices. Is that true or am I just making some kind of configuration mistake with the drivers or the OS? Any help is Do you have a switch between the host and the Clarion? What happens when you run a read/analyze on the LUN through format? Did you label the LUN through format? We have used Emulex cards w/ the Clarion line and have had great luck. appreciated. Charles McCane Dallas, TX. |
#4
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I've had essentially the same exact problem as you're describing.
Over here, I have a CLARiiON FC5500 array, and tried connecting it to the SOC+ ports on my E4000 (which is basically the on-board version of the FC100/S). The machine saw the RAID LUNs, but when I went to write the label in format, it just hung forever. (and eventually timed out with an error) Further testing (banging on the raw device with "dd") revealed that I could read from the array, but not write reliably. If you'll refer to my response to your last post, I mentioned that I have now purchased a JNI FC64-1063 SBus HBA, and it works perfectly. While I have no idea what the problem is, I suspect that the SOC+ (Sun's 100MB/s FC-AL controller) is only truely compatible with the StorEdge A5000, and maybe a few other Sun arrays. For the heck of it, I'll mention that I also tested the array on a PC with both an LSI FC909 HBA, and a QLogic QLA2100 HBA. Both also worked perfectly, albeit with substandard performance when compared with the FC64-1063 (though I could blame this on any number of factors, though not the OS (as I tried a few with similar results), given that I was sticking fancy 64-bit PCI cards in a vanilla 32-bit PCI desktop). -Derek Konigsberg |
#5
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"news.directlink.net" writes:
Being relatively new to fibre channel, I need to gain more awareness of what works and what to expect. Maybe some gurus here on usenet can help. I discovered that my Sun X6730A (FC100/S) card will not correctly communicate with a Clariion FC5700 DPER. I don't understand why. Doesn't everyone follow the ANSI standard for Fibre Channel? Is the standard kinda "loose" or what? I've seen a number of shops with large systems that had Fibre Channel cards from 2 or 3 different vendors talking to arrays from different vendors. I never really considered why. I think I'm beginning to get a clue about this. In my configuration I can see one device out on the Fibre Channel. It is identified as a DGC (Data General, creator of Clariion). This device has 3 LUN's available (yes, I already did the sd.conf). But any further communication beyond the format command to see available drives results in "SCSI transport failed: reason 'timeout': retrying command." It seems like connecting an FC100/S to a Clariion is like breaking the main law of Fibre Channel: Never expect interoperability between any two given devices. Is that true or am I just making some kind of configuration mistake with the drivers or the OS? Any help is appreciated. What OS version? Solaris 9? I've had endless problems with Suns FC100/S Sbus adapters under Solaris 9 trying to communicate with Sun A5000 FC boxes. A setup you'd think would be stable... I think it might be something in Solaris 9 since I've got a lot of reports from other users of the FC100/S that it works - but those users have all been using Solaris 8 or earlier releases... Alas, we now use HBAs from JNI instead. Works like a charm. - Peter -- -- Peter Eriksson Phone: +46 13 28 2786 Computer Systems Manager/BOFH Cell/GSM: +46 705 18 2786 Physics Department, Linköping University Room: Building F, F203 |
#6
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Using Solaris 8 here. And now I've ordered another JNI adapter because so
many people say that it works. Thanks to everyone for the replies. Obviously I have a single bad adapter but the FC64-1063 in general is a good choice for the job. As soon as I get this working with JNI on FC-AL, I'll be switching over to FC-SW with a Brocade switch. I'm confident that I'll be back with more issues then. Thanks, Charles "Peter Eriksson" wrote in message ... "news.directlink.net" writes: What OS version? Solaris 9? I've had endless problems with Suns FC100/S Sbus adapters under Solaris 9 trying to communicate with Sun A5000 FC boxes. A setup you'd think would be stable... I think it might be something in Solaris 9 since I've got a lot of reports from other users of the FC100/S that it works - but those users have all been using Solaris 8 or earlier releases... Alas, we now use HBAs from JNI instead. Works like a charm. - Peter -- -- Peter Eriksson Phone: +46 13 28 2786 Computer Systems Manager/BOFH Cell/GSM: +46 705 18 2786 Physics Department, Linköping University Room: Building F, F203 |
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