Fibre Channel SAN Bottlenecks » ADMIN Magazine

Monitor and optimize Fibre Channel SAN performance

Tune Up

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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