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Help! My job is on the line!! Storage Area Network not working? - Azrael Today is my fist day on the job as a network and SAN admin. I know about networking, but I don't really know anything about SAN..I kinda padded my resume a little and padded my responses in the interview...anyway. My first day is today and the first task they want me to do is to set up a fibre SAN. I need to connect 15 servers to the SAN and allocate two 150Gig logical drives to each. This is urgent! We have a demo tomorrow morning with some customers. They are flying in from all over the country. My manager says I need to have everything up and running and tested for failover by tonight. I have spent hours and I am lost. Here is our setup Dell servers with qlogic HBAs --> Brocade 200e switch --> brocade 48000 switch --> EMC clarion I have physically hooked everything up and there are green lights, but the server do not see the hard drives in the EMC stoage unit. I can ping the brocade switches IP from the servers...so it should be working. The switches also show they are segmented. I need help now! Google searching aren't helping. My boss will be here in a few hours! I need this working when he arrives.

Best Answer: 1. Are you running the right firmware on the Q-Logic HBAs? Depending upon your architecture you may need to downgrade the firmware. Read that little yellow slip of paper that fell out of the Q-Logic boxes! 2. Did you install the Q-Logic iSCSI drivers on the servers, or let them self-configure as NICs?. They will work as NICs -- the SAN really doesn't care as long as it can see the IP addresses -- but you'll pay a performance penalty and if you're running Active Directory you'll make a real mess of DNS as some machines try to "talk" to the HBAs as if they were NICs, not as SCSI controllers. 3. Have you installed the Q-Logic management software and set up the storage volumes on the SAN and paired them with the servers and the proper ports on the Brocades? Q-Logic used to offer 24/7 support though I don't know if you deal with them directly any more that Dell has bought them out. When we set up our first SAN we had bought the gold level support and had an engineer on the phone helping us from the beginning. We also allowed him to remote in and assist. If you didn't buy support with the hardware, pull out your credit card. Only you can decide if that cost is worth your job or not. BTW, the FIRST think you should have done was tell your boss, "You gotta be sh!tting me! You want this set up overnight for a demo tomorrow? You DO realize that this isn't a "quickie" setup like installing a NIC driver, right??. I'll give it my best, but you're asking me to rebuild Rome in a day." - Bostonian In MO

I think you should quit your job since you lied on your resume. Good job on that one - southernguy

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