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Monitor and optimize Fibre Channel SAN performance

Tune Up

Article from ADMIN 55/2020

By Roland Döllinger

We discuss the possible bottlenecks in Fibre Channel storage area networks and how to resolve them.

In the past, spinning hard disks were often a potential bottleneck for fast data processing, but in the age of hybrid and all-flash storage systems, the bottlenecks are shifting to other locations on the storage area network (SAN). I talk about where it makes sense to influence the data stream and how possible bottlenecks can be detected at an early stage. To this end, I will be determining the critically important performance parameters within a Fibre Channel SAN and showing optimization approaches.

The Fibre Channel (FC) protocol is connectionless and transports data packets in buffer-to-buffer (B2B) mode. Two endpoints, such as a host bus adapter (HBA) and a switch port, negotiate a number of FC frames, which are added to the input buffer as buffer credits at the other end, allowing the sender to transmit a certain number of frames to the receiver on a network without having to wait for each individual data packet to be confirmed (Figure 1).

Figure 1: The Fibre Channel frames are transferred by the SAN from the sender (server) to the receiver (storage array) over the FC switch ports by the connectionless buffer-to-buffer method.

For each data packet sent, the buffer

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