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Status Future consideration
Workspace IBM i
Categories Storage
Created by Guest
Created on Sep 27, 2021

IBM i MULTIPATH SAN BEHAVIOR

Hello IBM i and Storage Teams,

Due to an intermittent physical failure of a single SAN switch SFP resulted in significant system impact affecting this media company core business application, users and their customers for an extended period of time.
As the issue was not a hard failure, the disk paths would establish and everything running okay, until the next failure which may only last a few seconds but caused extreme response times to the users and their customers. It took some time to identify what was happening and at one stage a couple of days passed and we thought the issues had been resolved, this was not the case.
When a failure would occur and the system disk paths would recover, there was no method to reliably and cleanly change the priority of the multi paths, it keep coming back to the unreliable path each time.


Use Case:

We have review RFE cases 136197 & 143638 and it would be beneficial to have some method, manually, automatically or a combination to change the path status in the event a path is deemed unstable. How that is determined and how quickly the system may change a paths status may require an automated phase and alerts, and then confirmation to remain with that status until the root cause has been resolved.
I would also suggest having a one page summary status screen outside of SST to quickly review the status of paths and manage priority or changes.


Idea priority High
  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Nov 9, 2021

    The CAAC has reviewed this requirement and recommends that IBM view this as a high priority requirement that is important to be addressed. There is a potentially permanent failure looming, so there needs to be a warning for dealing with it, even when it is intermittent.

    Background: The COMMON Americas Advisory Council (CAAC) members have a broad range of experience in working with small and medium-sized IBM i customers. CAAC has a key role in working with IBM i development to help assess the value and impact of individual RFEs on the broader IBM i community, and has therefore reviewed your RFE.

    For more information about CAAC, see www.common.org/caac

    Nancy Uthke-Schmucki - CAAC Program Manager

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Sep 29, 2021

    Hello Holger,
    Thank you for highlighting this storage service, this customer system is V7R3 so doesn't include the new fields, but I will try it out on one of our V7R4 systems.
    Thanks, Paul

  • Guest
    Reply
    |
    Sep 29, 2021

    Paul,
    did you check SQL service SYSDISKSTAT
    ( https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/6340685 )
    which can deliver about multipath status, like

    SELECT ASP_NUMBER, UNIT_NUMBER, SERIAL_NUMBER, MULTIPLE_PATH_UNIT,
    RESOURCE_STATUS FROM qsys2.sysdiskstat ORDER BY SERIAL_NUMBER