Pervasive network diagnostics using HBAs

摘要

Specially configured host bus adaptors (HBAs) are located in the switches in the fabric or added to a management server. The HBAs are programmed to perform higher level protocol analysis, such as monitoring exchanges, LUNs, and VM/LUN/LBA ranges and developing SCSI statistics on the flows. The HBA can detect protocol exceptions. When located in the switches, mirroring of the desired frames is simplified as all routing is handled internally to the switch, with the HBA/switch combination providing data over the management Ethernet port to a management server. To maintain performance, preferably only the protocol relevant frames are mirrored to the HBAs. With the data provided from the HBAs, in conjunction with the normal diagnostic and statistics data available from the switch itself, the management server can correlate events end-to-end, correlate I/O error statistics collected from the fabric with server statistics, and correlate performance statistics collected from the fabric with server statistics.

主权项

1. A network device comprising:
a plurality of network ports; a control processor; memory coupled to said control processor; a switching component coupled to said control processor and said plurality of network ports, said switching component to perform switching of frames, said switching component further mirroring selected frames for data analysis; a host bus adaptor coupled to said control processor and connected to said switching component to receive said mirrored selected frames, said host bus adaptor configured such that it does not handle normal network traffic and said host bus adaptor configured to perform analysis of said mirrored selected frames and to provide said analysis to said control processor; and a management network interface coupled to said control processor to allow said control processor to forward said analysis to an external management station.