Folks,


I would like to hear your experiences or better yet comparison of  McData
Sphereon 4700 with Brocade Silkworm 4100 4Gb switches.

CurrentIy our environment is
2 SUN media servers, STK L700, SL500 at one location, connected via 2 STK
StoreNet 4100 ( re-branded 1Gb Brocade SilkWorm 2800 ) to
2 SUN media servers, STK L700 at the remote location, another 2 StoreNet
4100.
L700 populated with SDLT220s and SDLT320s drives, which SAN'ed via
Crossroads 4x50 SCSI to FC bridges.
Netapp R200 NDMP from the remote location via DWDM to SL500 at this
location.

2 StoreNet 4100 ( re-branded Brocade SilkWorm 2800 )  at each location
ISL'ed and DWDM'ed to other location.
We are doing in-line copy of each backup ( except NDMP form Netapp ).  1
stream to a local library, 1 stream to remote one.
We vault local tapes and rotate tapes in remote L700.


We were having really hard time with SDLT drives going down every day and
SCSI-FC bridges being hung in this SSO configuration.
Of course the backup window grew with time to 24x7 and initial 1 month
on-site retention is shrinking as the ammount of data dumped doubles each
year.

At thi spoint we decided to replace SDLTs with LTO3, upgrade DWDM to 2Gb (
2 of them ), upgrade to 4Gb HBAs on media servers and of course upgrade to
faster 4Gb switches.

We all set and decided on keeping the existing L700 and buying LTO3 HP
drives.
It is the switch selection, whcih drives us crazy.
CISCO came out to be cost prohibitive for this simple mini SAN.
Brocade seems to be all right at more than twice less money + Extended
Fabric license ( to get enough buffer-to-buffer credits for DWDM ports )
But McData's 4700 is more than twice cheaper that Brocade and seems to be a
real deal, plus no additional license for DWDM required.

Any input on switch seleection is appreciated.

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