Diagnosing Slow Fiber Performance

Bad link configuration can severely degrade the performance of a SAN. A misconfigured fiber link can force the ports (typically for disk array and switches) to repeatedly re-emit the signal in order to properly perform the data transmission.

The Port Status class reports on the various types of errors encountered by each port allowing SAN administrators to identify the exact symptoms of a slow fiber link, and thus figure out the root cause leading to the array slow performance.

Port Status Parameters

Look carefully at each of the Port Status class parameters. Any growing value needs to be reported to the SAN administrator in charge of the configuration of the fiber switches. Any value greater that 1 will trigger a warning in the PATROL Console.