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Fibre Channel SANs Questions

S

SychoSly

n00b
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Jan 10, 2004
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56
Can someone explain the hardware used in SAN solutions?

How do all the drives connect?

I don't even know what questions to ask. If someone has a tutorial or pictures.
 
A very brief overview of FC-AL vs Switch Fabric vs P2P. The drives connect to the array normally, hot swap cage style, though the connector is relatively small (40 pin). Probably 2/3 the width of a 68 pin SCSI connector. Ebay should have better pictures of FC drives and connectors, controllers and switches if you need them.

I have barely scratched the surface of FC myself due to a lack of free time... hopefully someone more enlightened will come along and share some knowledge :cool:

edit: and of course google is your friend ;)
 
dirtydr said:
A very brief overview of FC-AL vs Switch Fabric vs P2P. The drives connect to the array normally, hot swap cage style, though the connector is relatively small (40 pin). Probably 2/3 the width of a 68 pin SCSI connector. Ebay should have better pictures of FC drives and connectors, controllers and switches if you need them.

I have barely scratched the surface of FC myself due to a lack of free time... hopefully someone more enlightened will come along and share some knowledge :cool:

edit: and of course google is your friend ;)
Click to expand...


Thanks for the info. I did look on ebay and that is what got me even more confused. I saw the hard drives and saw the connectors for them. That isn't the problem. I then saw the controller cards and there are no connectors on it. Like an IDE or SATA has connectors for the cables, but a fibre channel card has no connecters but just 2 fiber ports on the front of it.

So where/how do the hard drives connect to the controller?

Is the cable that connects the harddrives a long cable with multiple connecters for multiple drives?

Anyone have pictures of how the stuff actually connects together?

Thanks.
 
I believe the backplane is where the transition to either twisted pair or fibre occurs but again I am no expert.
 
Fibre will have the drive in an external cage with connectors for the drives. The cage will have a SC fibre optic connection that will either connect to a fibre switch or directly to a fibre controller on the host computer. In SAN's the cards in the host computer are called HBA's (host bus adaptors). The SAN I run had dual 16 port Brocade Silkworm fibre switches, the san has dual redundant fibre connections, each server connected to it has dual redundant HBA's with one connected to each switch and each switch has a connection to the redundant connections on the SAN. Software runs on the servers which controls the two HBA's so that only one will be active and let the servers see only one instance of the drives assigned to it. The software provides automatic failover to the other HBA in case on the the cables get disconnected, cut, or one of the 16 port switches dies.

On the san itself you connect a laptop and assign drives as RAID volumes. For example the EMC array we have has 96 181GB drives (roughly 17TB) we group a dozen or so drives as a RAID volume which can be assigned to any attached server. That server can also boot from this drive. Several of the drives are assigned as hot spares which will automatically come on and take over the duties of any failed drive in any raid volume in the array.

I did once for fun create a 16 drive RAID 0 array and loaded up Windows 2000 Pro on a dual proc Xeon 3.5Ghz server with 4GB of RAM to it. The damn thing would boot in about 15 seconds flat once the RAM was counted and it actually started loading windows. :D It can go into a lot more depth such as the 256MB dual cache controllers on the SAN, etc, etc. Hope this gives you an idea. The one I run had a total cost of around 140 grand. You can pick up older ones on eBay for pretty cheap though but it will take a good bit of technical understanding to get one up and running.
 
#1. www.sca40.com is your friend.

#2. i built a custom FC-AL (that's Arbitrated Loop) external system as a project for AMDZone back in the day. I'll see if i can dig up the text of that document.

#3. FC does NOT require optical fibre in order to work. It can use a serial connection. GBICs are similar to those used in Cisco, et. al. routers, etc.

#4. www.qlogic.com

sounds like i need to do another FC review...YEEHAA!

dave
 
Good points - no optical is not required. They are called fibre drives but the connectors on the drives are actually copper. Whether you go optical or not is simply a matter of the type of connections you will be using to the machines and what type of connections the array cage has (frequently an interchangable card so either could be used).

Fiber Channel drives are also some of the cheapest avaiable SCSI drives on eBay nowadays as well and some of the most reliable and fastest drives you can find even today.

dave_graham said:
#1. www.sca40.com is your friend.

#2. i built a custom FC-AL (that's Arbitrated Loop) external system as a project for AMDZone back in the day. I'll see if i can dig up the text of that document.

#3. FC does NOT require optical fibre in order to work. It can use a serial connection. GBICs are similar to those used in Cisco, et. al. routers, etc.

#4. www.qlogic.com

sounds like i need to do another FC review...YEEHAA!

dave
Click to expand...
 
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