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A few basic SAN questions

 
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Don Mallory
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Re: A few basic SAN questions

Hi Thomas,

FCIP or iFCP, depending on whether you want a split fabric or a single integrated fabric is really only used to extend large fabrics. If you have everything in a single data centre, great, no need, if it's over 100km away, you need these to interconnect the fabrics, but to do so will also require either a Multi-Protocol Router (MPR) or a director with modules that can do that sort of thing.

The cost of an MPR (or blade), and/or licenses to use those services, plus the SFPs for interconnect and the WAN bandwidth to support it, you will find that it's not cost effective.

By the time you get to this level, it's better to look at FCOE (Fibre Channel Over Ethernet), which is not the same thing at all. At the point that you get into FCOE, yes, the cabling is less expensive, and converged switches are less than fibre switches, but once again, the cost of FCOE HBAs is notably higher than a couple of extra NICs with or without TCP Offload Engines (TOE) to support iSCSI and also noting that a lot of (I)OSes don't seem to support TOE very well yet, at least not without tweaking.

Yes, I agree that some of this is a sweeping generalisation, but given that Mikko is new to implementing SAN infrastructures and is in a SMB style office setting (40 users), getting into a FCOE implementation seems a little overkill when iSCSI would more than likely meet the needs as they have been identified.

Don