SDC2020: Smart Fabrics: Building Self-Healing Fibre Channel Networks

IT administrators are faced with a surge in digital demands while at the same time being overloaded with issue isolation and troubleshooting performance problems. Given their demanding workload, wasted time becomes a stumbling block for the digital businesses they support. These administrators are being judged by a new set of rules: accelerate IT delivery and increase focus on digital transformation. Fabric Notifications, a new solution from the INCITS T11 Committee, enables hosts and Fibre Channel Fabrics to collaborate and identify and remediate events that cause performance problems on storage area networks.

Today, the lossless, low-latency, high-performance storage connectivity that Fibre Channel delivers makes it the trusted technology for enterprise customers and a majority of networked block storage. Fabric Notifications builds on the benefits of Fibre Channel by sharing information between the Fabric and Hosts, enabling the Fabric and Hosts to collaborate and remediate performance problems. This session will discuss what Fabric Notifications are, why they are important, the benefits of freeing up an IT administrator’s time, and how developers can take advantage of Fabric Notifications in their products.1

Learning Objectives
Specific network issues that Fabric Notifications address
A high-level overview of Fabric Notifications, especially how HBAs and switches collaborate to automatically solve performance problems\How developers and users can take advantage of Fabric Notifications to build resilient and automated storage networks

Presented by
Brandon Hoff, Director, Product Management, Fibre Channel Industry Association, Broadcom Inc.
Rupin Mohan, Director R&D, CTO SAN, HPE