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What is SAF-TE?

SAF-TE stands for SCSI Accessed Fault Tolerant Enclosures. It is an industry-standard specification that allows SCSI-attached subsystems to interface with the enclosure and component electronics, and report state of:

  • Fans
  • Power Supplies
  • Devices in slots
  • Door locks
  • Temperature
  • Audible Alarms
The SAF-TE processor presents itself to your host operating system as a SCSI processor device (type=3), which is typically assignable as a user-defined SCSI target ID. Management is in-band, over the SCSI interface.

If your enclosure connects via a FibreChannel or SAS cable, then it will use the SES (SCSI Enclosure Services) specification.  SES-based enclosures have a more extensive instruction set which allows software to programmatically manipulate fault lights, alarms, etc... ; So if you are using software-based RAID, and SANtoolsŪ software, then you can configure it to turn on the audible alarm and fault or identification LEDs while the operating system rebuilds a LUN.

How do I Monitor Enclosures

SANtool's SMARTMon-UX is ported to all major operating systems (including itanium 64-bit platforms), and will query and monitor all of your SAF-TE and SES enclosures, as well as the devices. It is a full-featured command-line utility suitable for system administrators, OEMs, and storage architects.

SMARTMonUX is a single small-footprint application that:

  • Supports SCSI, fibre channel, ATA/SATA, and SAS peripherals, as well as numerous RAID controllers.
  • Has mode page editor, and log page viewer with extensive vendor-unique database to report information you didn't know was even possible to reveal.
  • Diagnostic self-tests for storage devices, with extensive error log reporting.
  • Reports FC transport information via the SNIA common API
  • Threshold monitoring, custom scripts, email alerts.
  • Extensive disk diagnostics, exercising, burn-in, firmware flashing, secure erase, error injection, block remapping, disk drive resizing, and embedded self-testing ... on whatever O/S the host computer is running.
  • Click here to see the manual for the command-line version of SMARTMon-UX, or for the Windows-GUI software S.M.A.R.T. Disk Monitor (SMARTMon).