Specifications
DATA CENTER BEST PRACTICES
SAN Design and Best Practices 59 of 84
Maintenance
There is usually no need to keep the Brocade Access Gateway rmware levels synchronized with the rmware
levels deployed in the fabrics to which it is connected (and Brocade supports connections from other vendors’
NPIV-enabled devices, where rmware synchronization is impossible). This can be signicant for very large
fabrics with many devices, including many Access Gateways. The version of Brocade FOS running on fabric
switches can be upgraded at one time and the Access Gateways at another time, which greatly reduces the
amount of change required to the infrastructure during a single maintenance window.
With the advent of Brocade FOS v7.0, end-to-end monitoring is now available for the Brocade Access Gateway.
Brocade FOS v7.1 adds ClearLink D_Port support for Gen 5 Fibre Channel platforms, Credit Recovery, and
Forward Error Correction.
See the Brocade Fabric OS Release Notes to determine if a synchronized Brocade FOS upgrade of Brocade
Access Gateway devices is required.
BACKUP AND RESTORE
Backup and restore is part of an overall Disaster Recovery strategy, which itself is dependent on the criticality
of data being backed up. In addition to storage consolidation, data backups are still a primary driver for a
SAN-based infrastructure. This is commonly known as LAN-free backup, leveraging high-speed Fibre Channel
for transport.
Note: Since tape drives are streaming devices, it is important to determine and maintain the optimal transfer rate.
Contact your tape drive vendor if this information is not available.
The key factors for backup and restore include the following:
•Restoring backup data successfully is the most critical aspect of the backup/recovery process. In addition to
ensuring business continuity in the event of a man-made or natural disaster, it is also a regulatory compliance
requirement.
•Backups must be completed most, if not all, of the time.
•You should leverage backup reports so that administrators can keep track of tape media utilization and drive
statistics as well as errors.
•If tapes are kept offsite for storage and Disaster Recovery, encrypt the data for security purposes.
Verify whether your industry requires data on tapes to be encrypted. Brocade offers tape and disk encryption
solutions for data at rest.
Create a process and document procedures to validate backups periodically. Back up not only application data,
but also include switch congurations to ensure that in the event of a switch failure a new switch can quickly
be congured. Use Brocade SAN Health, Brocade Network Advisor, or the Brocade FOS CLI to capture switch
congurations.
Determining SAN Bandwidth for Backups
At a minimum, available bandwidth in the fabric should be able to support applications and backup throughput.
For example, in an edge-core-edge topology, the ISL paths from the storage-core tape and host-core tape should
be able to support total throughput of all active tape drives and all applications without congestion. As shown in
Figure 40, these paths should be redundant so that the failure of an ISL will not cause congestion in the fabric,
impacting application or backup performance.