IT organizations worldwide are challenged to keep their Storage Area Networks (SANs) always available and fully optimized. There is a running joke within the data center community that whenever there is a performance problem, blame the storage network first. There is a reason for this. As the industry transitioned from Direct Attached Storage to Network-Attached Storage and SANs, the storage environment became more complex. There were more components, more vendors, more integration, and as a result, the storage network did introduce more performance problems. Having said that, the fact still remains that not all problems are storage network-related! Often, a fair amount of time can be spent on proving the storage network is, in fact, healthy. In such cases, it is only after this step that root cause analysis can start elsewhere, in earnest.
When customers have performance issues within their data centers, Emulex is often asked to help determine the root cause. This is primarily because of Emulex’s decade-long experience in server and storage network connectivity. Even though the adapter is a key component in the SAN data path, most often, it is not the cause of the problem. Often, the source of the problem resides within the various layers of the system. Layers include the application, files system, protocol stacks, operating systems, schedulers, hypervisors, volume management software, multi-pathing software, device drivers, PCI subsystems, virtual and physical networks, storage devices and more. These layers can all cause various types of issues within the data center, and below, we’ve highlighted some common ones:
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