Instruction/ maintenance manual of the product 53-0001575-01 Brocade Communications Systems
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SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 1 of 31 Building and Scaling BROCADE © SAN Fabrics: Design and Best Practices Guide.
Last Updated March 29, 2001 3:18 pm BROCADE SAN Integration and Application Department 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page 2 of 31 Design and Best Practices Guide This document contains BROCADE © r ecommendations and guidelines for configuring a Storage Area Network (SAN).
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 3 of 31 2.0 Fabric Topologies This section explores a variety of fabric topologies and provides some specific network examples for SAN fabrics.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 4 of 31 Tier Architecture Designs • Typically three layers of switches, a host layer, core layer, and storage layer .
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 5 of 31 useful when combined with a link extender that can allow from 30 to 120 kilometers distance between switch elements. There is a latency penalty for extended links that needs to considered where performance is a concern.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 6 of 31 Half of the switches are connected to form one fabric, and the other half form an identical fabric, which is completely unconnec ted to the first fabric. There is no single point of failure in either fabric which could cause the fabric to segment.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 7 of 31 FIGURE 2. Two Core Switch, Two ISL, Star Design. The above SAN is a single fabric, resilient design. To deploy a dual fabric, resilient SAN based upon this architecture, the fol lowing SAN would be built FIGURE 3.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 8 of 31 • Switch upgrades can take place on one SAN (firmware, hardware, both) and while this SAN is down the redundant SAN stays in operation • A switch failure in one SAN allow for failover to the redundant SAN while the failed switch is replaced.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 9 of 31 2.4 D UA L S W I T C H H I GH A VA I L A B I L I T Y C O N F I G UR A T I O N - R E DUN DAN T F A B R I C FIGURE 4.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 10 of 31 2.5 T W O S W I T C H F A B R I C F O R M I RR O R I N G AN D D I S A S TE R T O L E R ANC E FIGURE 5.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 11 of 31 2.6 H I GH L Y A V A I L A BL E S M A LL F A B R I C C O N F I G URA T I O N FIGURE 6. HIghly Available Small Fabric SW SW • In this design, any switch can fail and there will still be an alternative path to the host and storage devices.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 12 of 31 2.7 SAN B U I L D I N G B L O C K - M E S H E D F A B R I C C O N S I S T I N G O F T W O S T AR T O P O L OG I E S C O NN E C T E D B Y A M E S H FIGURE 7.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 13 of 31 2.8 S T A R T O P O L OG Y D E S I G N In the traditional data networking world, star topology network has a core of networking equipment (hubs, switches, and routers) with other equipment radiating out from this.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 14 of 31 FIGURE 10. Two Switch Core Star SAN Design The strengths of this design are numerous.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 15 of 31 FIGURE 11. Star Topologies shown with 2x16 port switch at the core and with 4x16 port switch at the core Brocade has tested and validate star SAN designs today with our SilkWorm 2800 16 port switch.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 16 of 31 FIGURE 12. Star Topologies Possible with 2 switch cores 2.9 T I E R D E S I G N.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 17 of 31 Three Tier designs in general allow for higher port count fabrics over Star designs (using the same switch building blocks) but can add additional hops to the design.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 18 of 31 FIGURE 14. MUlti Tier SAN Design across an Extended Link Depicted in the next diagram is a 20 switch fabric, three tier, with 4 switches at the core.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 19 of 31 FIGURE 15. Twenty Switch Three Tier Design (also a Star configuration) • 192 user ports total; total of 64 IS.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 20 of 31 2.9.1 S U MM A RY A variety of SAN designs topologies and port counts can be deployed today using Brocade switch.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 21 of 31 3.0 Additional Considerations in Fabric Design and Implementation 3.1 F A B R I C B R I N G U P A large (greater than 8) switch fabric will require care and planning on initial power up and for expanding switch elements.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 22 of 31 FIGURE 17. Valid and Invalid Configurations using Inter Switch Links 3.3 C A BL I N G AND M E D I A I N T E R F A C E S Fibre channel supports several cable and optical media interface options.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 23 of 31 for wiring components that do not need to be a long distance from the switch.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 24 of 31 The total size of a switch fabric is related to a number of factors that can affect overall performance. Some factors include: • Total nodes, entries in the name space.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 25 of 31 of Fibre Channel is that data is transferred based on buffer credits assigned to ports and sending and receiving devices manage the credits so that there is never an overrun of data in the switch.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 26 of 31 fabric using IP over fibre channel protocol across switch links, thus reducing the need for a large switch management network.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 27 of 31 width of 100 MBytes/sec. Thirty disks attached to a hub on a single physical loop will not perform as well as 5 disks attached t o 6 switch QuickLoop ports. Other advantages are: • Loop tenancies can occur in parallel on different looplets.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 28 of 31 4.0 G lossar y This glossary provides definitions for the fibre channel and switch terminology used in BROCADE guide .
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 29 of 31 Frame Fibre channel structure used to transmit data. Consists of start-of-frame delimiter, header, any optional headers, data payload, cyclic redundancy check (CRC), and end-of-frame delimiter.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 30 of 31 Topology As applies to fibre channel, the structure of the fibre channel network and the resulting possible communication paths. There are three fibre channel topologies: point-to-point, fabric, and arbitrated loop.
SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm 53-000 1575-01 B ROCADE Technical Note Page: 31 of 31 Copyright IMPORTANT NOTICE This document is the property of BROCADE. It is intended solely as an aid for installing and configuring Storage Area Networks c onstructed with BROCADE switches.
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