Number of ports for 3PAR Remote Copy over FC

[Adam X. White]

Hi all

Hope this is the right forum. I'm researching HP 3PAR StoreServ 7000 configuration at the moment and I have a question about Remote Copy over FC (RCFC).

How many FC ports do you recommend for a 4-controller storage system (StoreServ 7400) for Remote Copy? Docs I have read seem to indicate "minimum of two, max one per controller" i.e. max four if you have four controllers.

How does this work if you use two ports? Two of the controllers will have one port each but two will have no ports - what happens to your VV replication if one of the controllers hosting the RCFC port fails? Does this prevent replication? Which two of the four controllers should have the RCFC ports - one per node pair? Is it necessary to use four RCFC ports to achieve full redundancy or is two sufficient and four just for better performance?

Sorry if my terminology is wrong; I was advised by a HP rep that "node" means a pair of controllers - a 7400 with four controllers is a two-node system - but every document I have found seems to use "node" to refer to a single controller and I'm not sure what controller pairs are meant to be called.

Thanks

Adam

P.S. This thread has been moved from Disk > Disk Array to Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Enterprise) - HP Forum Moderator

[Dennis Handly]

(Sorry I couldn't answer your first question.)

>I was advised by a HP rep that "node" means a pair of controllers

That's incorrect and not what "shownode" will output.

>but every document I have found seems to use "node" to refer to a single controller

Right.

>I'm not sure what controller pairs are meant to be called.

Node pair.

[giladzzz]

Hi

1) Each controller has 2 FC output and the controllers come in pairs

2) if you use one output for RCFC that means you loose one FC for production traffic. Depending on how much RCFC

ports you want. This configuration is not optimal.

3) you can add a 4 port FC card on each controller and then you can dedicate a port for

RCFC with out compromising on production. This is more expensive. But then you can add ports for production and also you can create synchronous and asynchronous replication. Because they can't be mixed on the same ports.

Regards

[KurtG]

Youre controller nodes internal fc cards should normaly be used for front end/server traffic. For replication purposes you should add fc cards to one of the node pairs. (i.e. node 0 and node 1). The optional fc card has 4 ports adding 8 ports to youre system in total. 

For normal replication purposes this should be enough on the 7400 with 4 controller nodes. Typically you would use two ports in total for replication in a 1-1 configurtation. If you loose both the nodes/controllers in this pair you system is down anyway. (You cant adress disk belonging to the failed node pair from the "surviving" node pair)

KurtG