Greetings all.
First I want to acknowledge what a pleasure it was to stumble across a Storage forum. Now I have a genuinely work related productive way to waste time on the internet!
I am considering overhauling our SAN environment. I am doing initial research and planning at this time. It is a pretty substantial fabric right now. A little over 1000 ports, all McData, 2 x i10ks, 3 x 6140s and a 4 x DS24s. It is a single fabric.
The plan is a split A side / B side with all that that entails. We are a DR shop and have lots of staggered/rolling availability between customer tests.
There is a desire to basically double the fabric port count.
It is not a financial possibility to get our hands on 4 i10ks ( ~$2 mil)
What kind of problems would I expect if I ended up running a large number of smaller ( 32/64 port switches ) ISLd back to a either A or B side core.
The i10ks ( 256 ports ) will be the core. I anticipate a full rollout would use about 1/2 the ports on each switch dedicated to ISLs. Initially 32 x 32 port switches brocade/mcdata flavored. Currently running in McData mode and using physical/port zoning. WWN zoning would not be a deal breaker.
There would be no more than 2 hops between any device. 2 to 4 x 4 GB trunked ISLs to each edge switch. BrocaData engineers stated max supported domain count in a fabric as 31. I would only be running about 20 on each A/B side.
Any ideas/suggestions/been there dont do it advice? Thanks everyone. Talk to you soon.
First I want to acknowledge what a pleasure it was to stumble across a Storage forum. Now I have a genuinely work related productive way to waste time on the internet!
I am considering overhauling our SAN environment. I am doing initial research and planning at this time. It is a pretty substantial fabric right now. A little over 1000 ports, all McData, 2 x i10ks, 3 x 6140s and a 4 x DS24s. It is a single fabric.
The plan is a split A side / B side with all that that entails. We are a DR shop and have lots of staggered/rolling availability between customer tests.
There is a desire to basically double the fabric port count.
It is not a financial possibility to get our hands on 4 i10ks ( ~$2 mil)
What kind of problems would I expect if I ended up running a large number of smaller ( 32/64 port switches ) ISLd back to a either A or B side core.
The i10ks ( 256 ports ) will be the core. I anticipate a full rollout would use about 1/2 the ports on each switch dedicated to ISLs. Initially 32 x 32 port switches brocade/mcdata flavored. Currently running in McData mode and using physical/port zoning. WWN zoning would not be a deal breaker.
There would be no more than 2 hops between any device. 2 to 4 x 4 GB trunked ISLs to each edge switch. BrocaData engineers stated max supported domain count in a fabric as 31. I would only be running about 20 on each A/B side.
Any ideas/suggestions/been there dont do it advice? Thanks everyone. Talk to you soon.
