Need help with Fiber Zone

[dvontom]

My NB environment is NB 6.0 MP6 on a windows 2003 server standard edition.
       The server has 4 Emulex LightPulse Fiber adapters ( 2 on each HBA ) (Unique ID's 0D70, 0D71 & 37C4,37C5) connecting to 2 EMC McData Fabric switches.
       The SAN consists of an EMC Clariion CX3 raid array and an SL500 Robotic tape library.
       The SL500 has 4 tape drives, each drive is connected to each switch as well as the robot (Unique ID's Robot D1DD, Tape drives D1EA, D1E7 & D1ED,D1F0)
       The Clariion has 2 SP's with 2 adapters connecting to each switch (Unique ID;s 6041E018EE,6841E018EE & 6841E018EE,6941E0188)

The problem I am having is a severe slow down to the point where the server reaches 100% cpu utilization. It seems to happen on the bigger clients where the data is over 300 gigs. The longer it takes the worse it gets. Staging jobs (DSSU) seem to make it worse.

I was hoping some one could lend me some advice on proper zonning of the fabric switch. Currently I have 1 zone for the Clariion and 2 adapters for the master server and a zone for the master server and the tape drives/robot.

example of my current zones

zone 1: master server -1 adapter from each HBA
              clariion - 1 adapter from each SP
          master - 0D70
          master - 37C4
         clariion - 6141E018EE
        Clariion - 6841E018EE

zone 2: master server - 0D70
             robot - D1DD
              tape drive - D1EA
              tape drive - D1E7

I am wondering if i need to isolate the master server adapters to only 1 zone. For example, remove 07D0 from the Clariion zone.

If any body has any advice on this, I would certainly appreciate the help.

thank you

dave

[quebek]

Hello
I would make zones where there is only one initiator - FC HBA from host. There can be many targets but only one initiator.
Also it is recommended to avoid zonning disk and tapes throught the same SCSI initiator.
Hope this would help!

[Srikanth_Gubbal]

i think this would be do good

Switch 1

connect - 1 SPA port(6041E018EE), 1 SPB port(96841E018EE), 1 Master server adaptor(0D70)

create a Zone with all these 3

Switch 2:

connect -1 SPA port(6841E018EE), 1 SPB port(6941E0188), tape drives (D1EA, D1E7 & D1ED,D1F0), 2 master server adaptors(37C4,37C5)

create 2 zones
zone1
SPA+SPB+master server(37c4)
Zone2
Tape drives+ master server(37c5)

so finally will have one adaptor free on master server and high availabilty from clariion.

[dvontom]

Thanks for the reply quebek,

So, you are saying that i should isolate the hba that feeds the tape drives?

That would mean removing that adapter from the zone that feeds the disk array. Leaving only 1 feed from the master hba to the disk array.

Do i understand that correctly? Or am i mistaken?

dave

[J_H_Is_gone]

I had some very bad slowness on my backups and found that we were saturating the network on the switch the master and media server were on.  ( I do not have a separate backup LAN).  So we moved the master and the media server to be plugged directly into the CORE. 
I am very very happy now.