Maximum Throughput on an ISL Link

[jeffturl_1]

I have a set of three 2/16v switches, with ISL links between them (no trunking). I recently ran the Brocade SAN health monitor to see what the throughput of the ISL links was running at. One of the ISL's appears to peak at about 190MB/S bearing in mind these are 2Gbps switches, if my maths is correct this is about 1.5gbps. Is the maximum throughput actually 2gbps or is it like Ethernet only 80% of the maximum? And since it is only the max and the average appears very low. What level of throughput should i be concerned my ISL link is congested?

Can anyone recommend any other monitoring other than the Brocade SAN health check to monitor switch performance?

[Johan Guldmyr]

You can use DCFM - data center fabric manager - to monitor as well.

Or for example cacti can be used.

2 gig link max would be around 200MB/s so I think 190MB/s is pretty good.

[Uwe Zessin]

2 GigaBit means

= 2.125 Giga Bit on the media

This includes overhead for the 8B10B encoding.

= 212.5 MegaBytes on the media

That includes overhead for FC headers and so on.

= 200 MegaBytes data on the media

So 190 MegaBytes/sec on a 2 GigaBit link is quite good usage (94.99%)


> or is it like Ethernet only 80% of the maximum?

That has been true for OLD Ethernet.
Not true on Full-Duplex point-to-point.