Patent ID: 7519701

Claim:
A method of propagating health status among related entities within a fibre-channel fabric system, said method comprising: analyzing a fibre-channel fabric comprising multiple fibre-channel switches; wherein each of said multiple fibre-channel switches comprises multiple ports; using a universal modeling language to draw classes' diagrams, describing parent-child relationship and behavior in a hierarchical system; showing names of said classes, with names of operations and attributes, and health status; using compartments to divide said classes' names, said attributes, and said operations; when said health status assumes one status chosen from following list: critical, marginal, or healthy; aggregating elements which are made up of smaller components or depend on smaller components; displaying aggregation relationship by a line and an icon pointing towards a parent class; displaying multiplicity by a positive integer number on said aggregation relationship line; determining said health status of each of said multiple fibre-channel switches based on said health status of said multiple ports with a child relationship with respect to said each of said multiple fibre-channel switches; wherein said health status of each of said multiple fibre-channel switches is updated based on priority assigned to each of said multiple ports; wherein if one of said multiple ports has a high priority and is in marginal or critical state, then said each of said multiple fibre-channel switches is in critical state; assigning a weight to each child node in conjunction to each priority value; cascading said health status for related entities in a cascaded structure; updating said health status of a first entity of said related entities; propagating said health status of said first entity of said related entities through rest of said related entities, based on relative weights assigned to each child entity; determining said health status of said fibre-channel fabric based on said health status of said fibre-channel fabric's child switches; wherein said health status of said fibre-channel fabric is updated based on priority assigned to each of said fibre-channel fabric's child switches; wherein if one of said fibre-channel fabric's child switches has a high priority and is in marginal or critical state, then said fibre-channel fabric is in critical state.