STORAGE

Finisar Corp., a leading provider of network performance tools and fiber optic subsystems, announced that LSI Logic Storage Systems, Inc., a leading provider of modular, high-performance, disk storage systems and sub-assemblies to server and storage OEMs, has standardized on Finisar's Xgig Analyzer Suite to help solve its storage area network (SAN) and Fibre Channel interoperability issues. Finisar's Xgig Analyzer Suite is a scalable, portable protocol analyzer platform for 1, 2, 4 and 10 Gb Fibre Channel and Gigabit Ethernet SANs. Xgig is a combined software and hardware package that streamlines resolution of events that cause performance problems. It enables users to design, implement, test and evaluate SANs and their components by automatically analyzing captured traces for errant behaviors and providing extensive performance analysis capabilities. According to Dr. M. K. Jibbe, who has spent the past decade working in the SAN testing area at LSI Logic Storage Systems where he currently serves as Manager and Lead of the Test Architect and Technology Team, "There are many problems to be found in SAN environments," which is why he has assembled a team to verify the interoperability of the company's storage products with different components. In his role, Dr. Jibbe recommends third-party vendor components to be used with the LSI SSI (Storage System Inc.) solutions and defines the test strategy and methods to verify that the LSI Storage products are compliant to different standards and interoperable with all the third-party vendors supported by LSI Logic. "Our objective is to test robustness to ensure that our array controller modules will work as advertised with the variety of SAN devices available today," Dr. Jibbe said. "Specifically, we strenuously test the system looking for problems such as protocol violations at the low level, issues with devices taking too long to log-in, path and node failover mechanics and timing, and network load balancing, all which effect reliability, availability, redundancy and serviceability -- key to any SAN customer installation. In a large SAN, you might have 10 different vendors reading the same protocol and interpreting it in 10 different ways," Dr. Jibbe explained. "We want to identify issues, as well as potential issues, before our solutions are deployed at customer sites." According to Dr. Jibbe, there is no one tool that can solve all SAN interoperability issues. "Even with the tracing capabilities that we have in our array controller and also provided by switches and host adapters, there is no way to properly isolate problems quickly unless you have a Fibre Channel analyzer," he said. "Without it, what you end up with is a lot of finger pointing between vendors." "We needed a very sophisticated analyzer capable of isolating all of the different SAN components -- from storage devices to switches -- to ensure that all network devices are properly communicating and complying with the Fibre Channel protocol," Dr. Jibbe continued. "It was also crucial that we are able to monitor our overall SAN, so that as we fix problems we make sure we are not simply creating another. If you can't isolate specific problems to specific problem areas, you are just shooting in the dark. Finisar's analyzers search and process every record in a trace file to help pinpoint specific events very quickly," Dr. Jibbe said. "We rely heavily on Finisar's Xgig Analyzer to debug and isolate issues in our SAN test environment to help us determine how different products interact with our array controllers. In a SAN, the problem could be virtually anywhere on the network. At least 90 percent of the time we are able to quickly isolate and diagnose trouble spots using Finisar's analyzers, leaving our engineers and designers free to concentrate on problems, not data."