9140 Design Question

[wpinberlin]

I have a customer interested in implementing disaster recovery oriented storage solution. Currently they have approx. twenty servers and assorted storage attached to two MDS 9140 switches in one location. They are expanding to a new data center and will purchase two more 9140's. They have four lines (all Fibre Channel) for E ports spanning the 17km between the data centers. All four are riding on a single fiber via CWDM - a situation they hope to change once they can find a provider with a divergent fiber path). Given the diverse capacities of the ports on the 9140's, what would be the optimal configuration for redundancy in this scenario? Should I just ensure that all ISLs are simply connected to one of the first 8 ports or does it make sense to spread them over the other ASICs (though this result in the loss of host ports...)

as ever, any thoughts are welcome!

thanx,

William

[jaswarne]

If they have 2 9140's in each location and there are a total of 4 ISL's between each location via CWDM, use 2 of the first 8 ports on the 9140's. Use the rest of the 8 ports for storage. The first 8 ports on a 9140 are line rate ports made spcifically for ISL's and Storage connectivity. The other 32 ports are optimized for host connectivity. If you have more storage ports spread them across the 32 ports, 1 per 4 port group and try to put the hosts that require the least amount bandwidth with those storage ports.

[wpinberlin]

jaswarne,

thanks for the tip - that is pretty much what i have figured. Just wondering, are the first 8 ports (line rate) on a single ASIC or two separate ASICs? Also, should i keep the physical fabrics completely separate or would it makes sense to simply create two VSANs across all the switches in order to increase redundancy.

thx!

William

[jaswarne]

The question is not that simple but there are seperate ASIC's per 4 ports, linerate or not.

[jjpeyrache]

hello

is it same rules for 9120 and new 9016 series ?

thanks

JYP