e i g h t - c u b e d . c o m 

4GB SAN switches

I shouldn't really be surprised that the storage farm at work is still growing. Perhaps I've been infected by the negativity that the company seems to show to OpenVMS. However, grow the environment does, even though some people would apparently like to see it go away.

The amount of storage has once more exceeded the number of ports I had on the edge of the SAN, so today I replaced the four 2GB switches that made up the cores of the two fabrics with four 4GB switches. The 2GB switches then became new edge switches, giving us another 28 ports on the edge.

With the 1GB and 2GB switches, we had the PID format specifier set to zero. With the new 4GB switches that don't support this PID format, we had to change the setting on all of the existing switches. I was actually quite concerned about this change making paths unavailable to the hosts until the hosts were rebooted. However, it turned out that just rebooting the switches and running IO AUTOCONFIGURE sorted things out.

But at the time, with our ongoing path issues, the nervousness factor was up there.

And speaking of the path issues, reconfiguring the SAN doesn't seem to have changed or resolved anything, either for better or for the worse.