MirrorDisk over FCIP?

[Rudy Williams]

Folks--

I am contemplating mirroring volumes from one VA to another that are connected via FCIP.

Is this feasible and are any sort of kernel tweaks needed?

Is this supported?

cjw

[Patrick Wallek]

I am actually doing some testing of this very same thing right now between two VA7400s. I am using HP's SR2122-2 storage router to do the FCIP. So far everything is working very well.

The biggest thing to watch is the amount of data that changes. If your data changes a LOT, then it is possible that the FCIP interface will not be able to keep. You could see a significant performance drop since Mirror/UX does synchronous mirroring.

I had one application live with mirroring over FCIP for about a week and I heard no complaints from the users about the speed, but then not a whole lot of data changes and the Gigabit link between the 2 SR2122's is pretty fast.

I also tested this very same scenario with some CISCO routers and I was doing the exact same thing over a 100Mb link. Again I had a live application mirrored and I never heard a word from the users (and these users would complain if it was slow).

I did no kernel tweaks whatsoever.

If you are contemplating HP gear, the SR2122 storage routers are fairly easy to setup. I got them installed, set up and could see the disk array across the Gigabit link with 2 or 3 hours.

Here is the site for the SR2122-2 storage routers:
http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/storageworks/sr2122-2/index.html