Re: Rules of the Road for Fibre Channel Interop

From: Peter Eriksson (peter_at_ifm.liu.se)
Date: 02/24/04 

Date: Tue, 24 Feb 2004 12:55:20 +0000 (UTC)

"news.directlink.net" <cdmccane@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 <peter@ifm.liu.se>            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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