Fibre Cabling Best practice

[avamar11]

Hi All ,
I am facing an interesting scenarion .We have 4 Blade chasis kept in a DC room ,but Storage Array and fabric switch is kept in a room about 50 -70 ms away (cable distance ) .I know it is feasible to connect Blade servers to Storage at that disatance ,but is it a good practice ,though we can have new rack in same room as Storage and keep servers there .(there will be around 48 connections from servers to Fabric Switch )?
Is there any best practices around these ?
kindly guide ...
Thanks in advance...

[Prokopets]

Can you please clarify one thing: do your blade chassis have SAN-switches or bypass panels?
Anyway, if you are going to use OM3 cable, there shouldn't be a problem to have 8Gb transfer speed with short-wave transceivers.

Take a look on this table from Product Bulletin:
====
Distance Maximum OM2 Cable OM3 Cable
8Gb performance: 50 meters 150 meters
4Gb performance: 150 meters 380 meters
2Gb performance: 300 meters 500 meters
====

And one more thing: as for me, it's better to use vendor's FC-cables instead of making custom ones.

[avamar11]

thanks ..
We have Brocade fabric switches in blade chasis working in pass through mode .Is there any best practice for this ...

[Marcus Schack]

This may help.

[avamar11]

thanks ..but it was EVA specific and so no use to me .Can someone provide general guideline .

[Uwe Zessin]

You can find lots of good information in the SAN design guide:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual&locale=en_US&docIndexId=179911&taskId=101&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=406734

It is kept current every couple of weeks/months, so keep an eye on this page.