Virtual Connect Fibre Bandwidth

[chuckk281]

Dave had a customer question on Fibre Channel bandwidth.

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I have a customer concerned about multiple blades FC ports getting funneled through Virtual Connect then to the uplinks to the SAN.

“Also there is some concern that while the blades are functionally are the same as the rack mount, they will still have to go through a common bus for SAN access putting a lot of contention on disk i/o. “

Can someone help me respond?

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Cullen joined the conversation:

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To an extent they’re right.  You could configure 16 HBAs through a single port.  The question back is:  what’s their current port oversubscription?  Do they currently use edge switches?  Alternatively, how much are they willing to pay to make sure there’s no oversubscription coming out of the enclosure?

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Steve also chimed in:

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I just had a similar conversation with a customer today.  He is considering Virtual Connect FlexFabric.  He does rack servers now.  He was concerned about having “only” 4 x 8Gb SFP for FC (per module) to connect his SAN.  However, his SAN has only 1 Clarion Array which connects to the current switches/fabric with 2 x 8Gb per fabric.  Plus he has no idea what his current utilization levels are.  He is going to do some checking on current utilization levels, but at the end of the call he was pretty comfortable (conceptually) with having 1 to 2 FC connections per fabric.

Also, keep in mind, if the customer has different traffic types, he can create multiple SAN fabrics within VC, and place, for example, the database servers on their own uplinks.  With Virtual Connect Flex-10 and VC-FC modules, he can have 8 x 8Gb per module, FlexFabric will support 4 x 8Gb FC uplinks per module.

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Other comments or suggestions?