Upgrading some old switches to latest FOS. Which FOS?

Hey Allen Ward, what do you think of this?

Yeah, well.... they say that as long as downtime of a single switch doesn't cause a major incident, an upgrade is low priority and with 2 fabrics... Well, low prio it is.

And upgrading them all to 6.4.3d is what I had in mind. I need to dig through the Release Notes to see if that makes sence since we're running 6.4.2 already anyway.

I never see McDatas anymore. In fact, I haven't seen a real McData switch under support in 6 years or so. The last one I encountered was a 4500 from 2005 or so with a version 6 firmware. I needed to revitalize 2 of them for a small lab environment.

Brocade? The 4400s and 4700 were some of the last McData switches. Not sure what ones you are thinking of, but I never liked the 4400. We were using 4700s in place of the 32M2s and when we needed a smaller switch someone decided that the 4400 must be the new equivalent of the 24M2. But what we got was a tiny unit that can't be rack mounted properly (unless you put two side by side) and a power brick like something you would buy at Best Buy. I was not impressed with it for an Enterprise environment.

Of course like everything McData (and Brocade for that matter) they were rock solid and never caused problems. They just worked. In the end that was the most important factor. But that was the last time we ever bought 4400s.

4400s? Waaw, those were the first Brocades I ever saw back in 2005 I think. Really good switches if you ask me.

Wow, haven't you got the prgressive environment :-)   I just got rid of the last of the 4400s and 4700s from our fabrics a little over a month ago. However, I still have a couple of production fabrics that are newer Brocade switches running in McData fabric mode. That was the easiest, lowest risk migration path at the time from the old McData switches to the newer switches... we put the new switches in McData Fabric mode and merged them with the old switches to pull all the zoning info across. We were left with just the Brocades but they are running McData mode. So a FOS v7.1.x switch won't talk to them directly.

Those ones are just coming up for replacement and this time we will be doing it the hard way :-)

good, makes me feel better i am not the only one running antique hardware.

i am still running McData ED-140M directors, they are about 10 years old now.

I forgot about the 6140s. We are migrating off them by the end of this year as well but I have a pair of them in one DC acting as the primary disk fabrics and I've got a pair in another DC acting as FICON fabrics for the mainframes.

It's not just you dynamox. Are you planning to get off them though?

not anytime soon, this customer is still running and using  Symmetrix 3500. Insane huh ?

A 3500? Do you still call that running? Wouldn't it be more like inching along with it's walker?

the box is running, but EMC techs who know how to support this array have long retired and moved to Florida.  We don't even have tools to manage this array anymore, if anything breaks we won't know. The Smithsonian called, want that piece in their technology section of the museum.

I hear you dynamox! it hasn't been that long since we pulled out some Brocade 6064s that were serving as FICON directors (and replaced them with used 6140s... go figure). And our Server guys finally gave up on the CLARiiON 4700-2 they were using in their lab about 6 months ago. I didn't even realize they hadn't junked it long ago until I walked by the purple beast sitting gutted in the hallway outside their lab on one of my trips to Winnipeg. I think even that might have been young compared to your 3500 though!

Do they still have the original mallet and chisel that came with it for creating the stone tablet punch cards? Or did those wear out before the array?

no punch cards but big and thick SCSI cables to connect hosts and dip switches in the front. Cool huh ?