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Re: Mezzanine HBA reliability

 
pakm11
Advisor

Mezzanine HBA reliability

Hi all,
I want to hear your opinion about using single mezzanine HBA with dual ports to provide "redundant" fabric access.

We are running with the same config as above and so far we have not had any mezzanine failures taking down both paths to SAN.

Please share your experiences / alternatives you can think of.
4 REPLIES 4
Adrian Clint
Honored Contributor

Re: Mezzanine HBA reliability

The most unreliable parts of a dual path SAN connection are the SPF or equivalent on the HBA, the cable and the SPF on the SAN switch. In a blade enclosure these are all replaced by copper tracks from the HBA to the SAN switch. So have removed the most common failing parts. Thats why having a dual port HBA is viewed as acceptable even for highly available solutions.

I have seen some customers that have initially gone for 2 HBAs in their first enclosures. But those that have also have said that they probably would not do so in the future due to HBA reliability.
Torsten.
Acclaimed Contributor

Re: Mezzanine HBA reliability

Related to HA a single server is always an SPOF, would you agree?

Hope this helps!
Regards
Torsten.

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pakm11
Advisor

Re: Mezzanine HBA reliability

Yes, but coming from SUN systems with multiple everything I was curious to hear your experiences with the mezzanine HBAs.
Like said, so far I have not had a failed mezzanine HBA nor a slot.
For Ethernet, we use one on-board and one mezzanine NIC to bond providing failover/round-robin.
Thanks.
WFHC-WI
Honored Contributor

Re: Mezzanine HBA reliability

Hi pakm,

We have not yet seen any failures of these devices. Maybe 150 in use over the last two years.

However considering the relatively low cost of the cards, we decided to implement them differently. We use two mezzanine HBAs in our half-height blades and populate our enclosures with a VC-FC module in bay 3 and another in bay 6, using only one of the ports on each card.

This allows us to keep redundancy at the fabric, switch, cable, VC-FC module, AND the HBA level. :)

good luck with your decision