Technical Support Bulletins

Description: On June 30, 2015 there will be a “leap second” event during which an additional second is added to the Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) clock to address irregularities in the earth’s rotation causing it to drift from the atomic clock. For Brocade products, if a centralized NTP server is used to sync the clocks the leap second will be accounted for in the NTP server itself, and the switches/routers will be "re-synched" to the NTP server following this adjustment In the case where a switch/router is not using an NTP server (or syncing to a central switch/router in the network) the date/time information is configured manually. If configured time is kept very accurately, it can be adjusted following the leap second event. However, for a switch/router being configured manually for time, it is highly unlikely that the time is set to more than 1-second accuracy. Also, it is worth noting that the time clock on a switch/router is only used for adding time stamps to logged events. No actual functionality is impacted on the switch/router based on the time, so there will not be any impact on its ability to perform its primary functions. The most important reason to keep switch/router clocks accurate and in sync within the network is to ensure the time stamps on log entries can be accurately correlated with one another in the event of some problem that requires investigation. In the case of Brocade SW products, these are also not impacted however Brocade recommends that customers follow best practices for the server operating systems on which they are running.