Long distance fiber connectivity

[Tim Chilton]

I am researching establishing an FC connection between our datacenter and a disaster recovery datacenter in another state traversing over 1000 miles. One site has a Brocade fiber backbone and the other uses Cisco. With the amount of knowledge capital represented on this site, I was hoping that 1) someone has had experience doing this sort of thing and 2)could give me some ideas as to what will be necessary to make this so. I'm looking for some ideas so that I'm not necessarily reinventing the wheel. Any help will be appreciated.

[IBaltay · Accepted solution]

Hi,
maybe this could help you:

SAN design guide:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00403562/c00403562.pdf?jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

continental cluster:
http://docs.hp.com/en/B7660-90026/ch02s01.html

[Steven Clementi]

Tim:

Can you give us any details on the 2 sites?

Is there any kind of connectivity in place at the moment? (non-fibre)

What is the reason to connect the sites? Obviously DR, but to what extent? Server recovery? Storage replication? geo clusters? all of the above?

What technologies are in use now? Storage Array's, Servers... etc.


There are a few options for connecting sites over long distances. Usually, 1k miles is beyond the normal for any type of fibre connection so you probably will be looking at FCiP. Depends on how much is in your budget tough... ;o)


Steven

[Hal Kuff]

Look into the Ciena CN2000, it extends fibre over anything from a DS-3 on up to OC-BIG.. We use it with a 5km OC-48 2gb SONET and it works flawlessly...
It provides compression so the effective rate is much higher... about 1.6x
One of our configs took a 2.4gb fibre and cut it down to two 1.5gb fibres and a 100mbit Ethernet. lots of options
Need to know distance, circuit and latency for the forum to help further...

[Tim Chilton]

Thanks, all!