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Nexus 5548 - Lto3 tape drives interface down

Hi ,

 

We have a bunch of HP Ultrium Lto3 tape drives, which stopped working with Nexus 5548 FC(N55-M16UP) Interface. The interface on the switch side stays down reading 'Link failure or not-connected', we have tried swapping the cables, SFP but to no avail. This was working until couple of days before we rebooted the tape drives.  

The odd thing is the interface comes up, when we connect it to back to a brocade 4100 (from which we moved to Nexus few weeks back), testing the drives directly connected to a server HBA fails too.

Note: We have a Lto6 tape drives connected to the same nexus switch which are all working fine.

Any suggestion ?

 

-Thanks

1 Accepted Solution

Accepted Solutions

This is the explanation of the problem, which I initially thought as well, see above.

NL means loop port !

Nexus 5595 doesn't support Loop port ! see the datasheet

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/nexus-5000-series-switches/data_sheet_c78-618603.html

You have to force the port on the Tape library to N, not NL.

Fibre Channel and FCoE Features (Requires Storage Services License)

  T11 standards-compliant FCoE (FC-BB-5)
  T11 FCoE Initialization Protocol (FIP) (FC-BB-5)
  Any 10 Gigabit Ethernet port configurable as FCoE
  SAN administration separate from LAN administration
  FCP
  Fibre Channel forwarding (FCF)
  Fibre Channel standard port types: E, F, and NP
  Fibre Channel enhanced port types: VE, TE, and VF
  F-port trunking
  F-port channeling
  Direct attachment of FCoE and Fibre Channel targets
  Up to 240 buffer credits per native Fibre Channel port
  Up to 32 VSANs per switch
  Fibre Channel (SAN) PortChannel
  Native Interop Mode 1
  Native Interop Mode 2
  Native Interop Mode 3
  Native Interop Mode 4
  VSAN trunking
  Fabric Device Management Interface (FDMI)
  Fibre Channel ID (FCID) persistence
  Distributed device alias services
  In-order delivery
  Port tracking

View solution in original post

5 Replies 5

Walter Dey
VIP Alumni
VIP Alumni

Could this eventually be a trivial port issue ? e.g. drive is in FC loop mode, and link negotiation fails ?

Ususally the switch is F-Port, the drive N-Port ?

Any console / syslog messages ?

Is this problem solved ? and if yes, could you please share it !

Hi,

Yes it seems to be a port issue. Am yet to get this fixed. I did mention in my earlier post that the tape drives were working with the brocade switch. When i logged in to brocade and checked the switch port is negotiating to L mode, if i force it to F it fails there in brocade too.

The tape drives port types are reading NL, does that mean it can be a N port or a L port ?

This is the explanation of the problem, which I initially thought as well, see above.

NL means loop port !

Nexus 5595 doesn't support Loop port ! see the datasheet

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/collateral/switches/nexus-5000-series-switches/data_sheet_c78-618603.html

You have to force the port on the Tape library to N, not NL.

Fibre Channel and FCoE Features (Requires Storage Services License)

  T11 standards-compliant FCoE (FC-BB-5)
  T11 FCoE Initialization Protocol (FIP) (FC-BB-5)
  Any 10 Gigabit Ethernet port configurable as FCoE
  SAN administration separate from LAN administration
  FCP
  Fibre Channel forwarding (FCF)
  Fibre Channel standard port types: E, F, and NP
  Fibre Channel enhanced port types: VE, TE, and VF
  F-port trunking
  F-port channeling
  Direct attachment of FCoE and Fibre Channel targets
  Up to 240 buffer credits per native Fibre Channel port
  Up to 32 VSANs per switch
  Fibre Channel (SAN) PortChannel
  Native Interop Mode 1
  Native Interop Mode 2
  Native Interop Mode 3
  Native Interop Mode 4
  VSAN trunking
  Fabric Device Management Interface (FDMI)
  Fibre Channel ID (FCID) persistence
  Distributed device alias services
  In-order delivery
  Port tracking

Yes, that's right. It's a not a switch issue. Figuring out how to force the library to N instead if NL, the tape's were doing it right before the reboot. It's a HP Ultrium LTO 3 & 4's on a Storagetek L700. 

 

Thanks for the help.

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