Will a 5412ZL support iSCSI ?

[SRCPLee]

We need to move an iSCSI SAN into our main datacenter but have no iSCSI infrastructure in the main datacenter. We do have a pair of Procurve 5412zl switches with unused GigE ports. Can the unused ports on the Procurves be used to interconnect the iSCSI hosts and array and will the switch support it?

[Ian Vaughan]

Howdy,

The GigE cards in the 5400zl models have decent buffers so the switch should be up to the task for 1Gb iSCSI.

If you don't have Jumbo frames enabled (I don't think they are on by default) switch them on along with the flow control feature.

If the switch is not dedicated to iSCSI SAN duties and you have any links that are shared you might want to look at a QoS configuration and possibly changing the number of queues down to 4 from 8. However in most cases this isn't necessary and requires a reboot to apply that queue change.

Try and avoid any uplink redundancy that relies on spanning tree as any flapping will kill your storage straffic. Use LACP link aggregation instead if you can. Hopefully you can create a topology with 2 redundant paths through the 2 switches to the storage controllers from the hosts. You should be able to set up the MPIO drivers to give redundancy on the subset of paths no problem.

As and when you need to move up to 10Gb iSCSI that is a different kettle of fish as the ZL 10GbE cards are a bit thin on buffer and there are better / more feature rich and capable offerings in the Comware based switches.

Hope that helps

Ian

[Richard Litchfield]

We have plenty of customers running iSCSI very happily on 5400 family switches. As you get more and more hosts and storage ports with 10Gb connections though, you will probably start looking at the Comware switches with higher 10Gb port densities. Buffer size is not everything, and many Comware switches have smaller buffers than each module in the 5400!