Re: A5200 fiber channel issues

From: Zombie (zombi_at_newsguy.com)
Date: 08/31/04 

Date: Mon, 30 Aug 2004 18:49:08 -0400

>
> Has anyone experienced similar flakiness with A5200s? These equipment
> is circa 1999-2000. I'm just curious what other people have been
> through using Sun's fiber-channel technology.
>
>

In my previous job, we had 50 plus A5200's we had this problem
happen quite often. You can try to load the latest and greatest firmware
for those FC-AL drives in the A5200. That will reduce the frequency of
one drive failure bringing down the entire loop. But in a year we would
get hit at least once with the number of 5200's we had.

We circumvented this problem, by mirroring data across A5200 storage
devices which have independent HUB's. This way even if one entire 5200
goes down, the other one is up and running fine.

That is the only way to prevent the system from being unavailable when
such failures occur.

Cheers!
Zombie.