Best Design practices of SAN with the MDS 9513,MDS 9509 and Brocade 8510

[Boominathan Sangapillai]

Hi

      Am searching best design to implement CISCO MDS 9513,9509, Brocade 8510,Storage and UCS all clubbed in the topology. And please suggest me any tool to compare MDS and Brocade 8510 performance.

[Jeremy Waldrop]

With UCS in the mix one of the advantages MDS has over Brocade is that fact that you can port channel the SAN FC uplinks from UCS to MDS but you can't with Brocade.

MDS also has the VSAN technology.

Performance wise I am sure they are very comparable, both can do 8GB FC and FCoE. Cisco may have a leg up with the 48 port line card that can do 8GB line rate to every port.

Management also comes into play here. If you already know how to configure, manage and troubleshoot MDS or Brocade and you switch there will be some training required to learn the new product.

[santkumd528]

 
Performance wise I am sure they are very comparable, both can do 8GB FC and FCoE. Cisco may have a leg up with the 48 port line card that can do 8GB line rate to every port.

what is the over subscripton ratio are you considering here?

[Nisar Sayed]

Boomi,

Both MDS and Brocade will serve basic features of Storage networking. Both can be mix and match to achieve redundancy, which you already have. However, if you are looking for any tool or perfmon then there isn't much to compare. You can use IOmeter or Akkori. I see that you have enterprise level hardware in your setup. Not sure what other line cards you have installed and what application are running through, and if you have remote sites (SAN islands) then the real difference of features and best practices can be discussed. For example, IVR, FCIP, ISCSI, FCoE, etc.

Thanks,

Nisar

Sent from Cisco Technical Support iPad App

[Boominathan Sangapillai]

Thanks Jeremy for ur support.

My design involves like this UCS-HBA1-FI1-MDS9513-Brocade8510-Storage as primary and secondary as UCS-HBA2-FI2-MDS9513-MDS9509-Storage. Please let me know which is the best path? Both paths are seeing same LUN in storage. How can we judge which is the best path and how we can analyze? Any tool is there?

Regards

Boomi