One area keeps coming up when people are talking about iSCSI and NAS is that Fibre Channel is hard! Really?
Zoning? Hard? Hardest thing about zoning is coming up with a sensible naming convention; zoning in itself is not hard. It's not any harder than allocating IP addresses and at least I don't need to be able to do binary/decimal conversions in my head to work out what can see what.
Lun Masking? Hard? Hardest thing about lun-masking is working out what a random manufacturer has called it this week.
Okay, so the difference between an WWPN and an WWNN catches people out at time but it's not so hard really.
Fibre Channel Networks are simpler than IP Networks. For small implementations, they are probably equally hard but when they start to get larger, I would argue that Fibre Channel Networks are easier to manage and maintain than IP networks.
I've seen comments that in a fibre channel network you need to manage firmware/drivers on switches, hbas etc and you don't in the IP world? Since when? You really should but you can get away with not doing so; you can also get away with not doing so in the FC world. Sure you'll have problems; I've seen problems in the IP world and especially in the NAS world with NFS implementations differing in subtle ways.
Fibre Channel is simply no more hard to manage than IP and we should stop letting industry commentators get away with telling us all that it is hard!!! Unless we all want to pretend that it is hard to justify our salaries? Woo, we are all storage magicians!!
G’day,
Personally, i think “most” storage people in the past were not skilled at fibre channel and used the “its very complex” excuse to justify their high pay grades and astronomical time frames – Yes, there were some storage guns, but most were not!
Three days to perform a zone change? Come off it!
The next generation of storage administrators will soon put those “its to hard” myths to bed!
Bring on FCoE
Well some of the toolsets that people have had to use didn’t make lives easy. But you are right, I’m sure there was some smoke and mirrors going on.
As for three days for a zone change, how many of those days were because people were waiting for change approval?
And FCoE is going to make a difference? I’m not sure that it will, probably end up transfering to another highly paid team called the Network team!
Shhhhh!!!! FC SAN complexity has been keeping me fed and warm for several years. Either because I was paid well for doing implementations, or because I’ve been able to use it as an excuse for iSCSI!
Let’s be honest though, flashing HBA firmware, LUN masking on to of Zones, the best practice of Single In. Single Target zone sets, and of course those pesky optical cables that are so fragile.
I’ll conseed that FC SANs in general aren’t the complex beasts they used to be, however, troubleshooting a FC SAN when things go wrong is complex. Having to deal with Buffer Credits, and queue depths and tuning a FC SAN for stability and performance aren’t simple tasks.
When you work with these concepts daily they become simple and make logical sense, but for a desktop/server admin. to go from internal HDDs, to storage consolidation and storage networking, this can still be a daunting task.
Yeah, I know I broke the code of silence!! But hey, it’s no longer rocket science!! And I’ll tell you another thing, I reckon most SANs are darn sight more stable than IP Networks. We don’t have to put up with users doing stupid things; or at least it is hard for my users to screw up my SAN. Screwing up an IP network, well any silly sod can do that with a tiny bit of thought.
Hi,
I don’t think FCoE will save us from anything other than cable hell in the data centre and under utilised network capacity across the board (FC and Ehternet) – it will also just shift the “it takes us three days to perform a zone change” to another team.
– oh, thats not including change control! 🙂
Finally someone came out and said it! Having worked with both over a number of years I’d actually say that the IP side is slightly more complex in terms of number of steps required. iSCSI can also be very difficult to troubleshoot, this is especially true where the customer’s main driver is cost and shared or commodity switching is used to reduce this.
Zoning is simple and pretty intuitive once you understand the basics, the main issue here tends to be lack of day to day use with the toolsets. In terms of LUN masking, ease of use depends on the vendor, but most are again pretty straight forward dropdown lists, which also apply to iSCSI use.
People are scared of the SAN fabric, but they’re familiar with IP/Ethernet based Networks. If you can combine that cosy familiarity with an ease of use case then you can sell product to the uninitiated. Hence the constant trotting out of this fallacy by the iSCSI players and paid pundits.