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July 31st, 2009 03:00

Fibre connection problem

I wonder if anyone out there can help shed some light on a major problem we are experiencing?? I am a server person but our network guys don¿t know how to fix it and we need help.

We have 2 sites, about 2 kilometres apart, and we connect through a 1Gb fibre. We have 2 fabrics using Brocade 5000 switches and the long wave ISLs are connected into a Smartoptics box at each site.
About three weeks ago, for reasons unknown, we lost the link to our remote site and when it came back only half the ISLs were working:

At each site we have:

1 Smartoptics for the Brocade switches/Clariions
2 x CWDMs for Cisco network

The SAN connections were through the Smartoptics, but now none of the ISLs work. If we put the 4 x ISLs into the first CWDM only the ¿blue¿ works. If we put the ISLs into the second CWDM only the blue and grey work.

The violet and green don¿t work at all, but all colours from the Cisco switches work in all three. We bought more coloured GBICs and tried adding extra ISLs to the Brocade switches, but none of them work through the Smartoptics or CWDMs.

We have replaced cables, reboot the Brocade fabrics, changed the speed of the ports and prayed, but still only the grey and blue GBICs are working. This means we have one link through each fabric. The fibre cables have been tested by our supplier and passed OK.

Any suggestion greatly received.

6 Operator

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5.7K Posts

July 31st, 2009 04:00

So on each site you have a smart optics MUX in which you have a Brocade switch and 2 LAN interfaces ? The Clariion is attached to the Brocade ? Each Brocade ISL to the other site using 1 SFP or 2 ?

So why only 1Gb ? The Brocade 5k can do 4Gb !
Furthermore you say you have the SO's for Brocade as well as Clariion, but long wave SFP's are not supported in a Clariion.

Are all SO boxes ok ? (1 per site or 2 (1 for each fabric) ?)

11 Posts

July 31st, 2009 05:00

Hi
Thanks for replying. I apologise for not explaining the problem very well.
We have a Smart optics MUX at each site. The Clariion is zoned into the Brocade switches and each Brocade has 2 ISLs to the other site. The ports are set to 4GB.
The ISL GBICs are Smart Optics SO-SFP-4GFC, there are 2 in each switch, grey and violet in Fabric A and green and blue in Fabric B. The grey one and the blue one are working, the others are not. All have been working for a long time, over a year, until 3 weeks ago.
To test we tried moving the cables in the Smart Optics to our CWDMs to see if the failed colours worked,but only the blue was succesful.

Regards

6 Operator

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5.7K Posts

July 31st, 2009 08:00

So each switch still has an ISL to the other site ? This looks like the switches don't switch on the 2nd SFP in each trunk. When you look in the GUI and click on the ports that are failing, do you notice anything like massive erros or anything ? Do you have ports free ? Can you pull out the "problematic" SFP and put it in an empty slot ? Make sure you set that port / slot to "E" (enable trunking), set the speed right
Also set any buffers that you might have set in the "extended fabric" tab (show advanced mode) under "switch admin".

When the port comes back online the trunk should form automatically again.

July 31st, 2009 08:00

Hello,

Did you open a case with EMC Support? If so I'll take a look at the logs and information you provided.

Thank you.

6 Operator

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5.7K Posts

August 3rd, 2009 01:00

And please keep us up to date as this is an interesting problem !
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