Fibre Switches: Talk to Me

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Bigdady92

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jun 20, 2001
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Looking at getting some used 24bay storage systems that run on Fibre Channel. I believe they support 2/4 and I'd like to push them to 4GBps preferred. Now my experience with fibre channel is limited, I've used it know all about the WWN and the fun/hilarity that ensues with them.

My question for [H] is to recommend me a low priced Fibre switch that I can tie in multiple fibre storage arrays with 4gbps (I take it this is only a GBIC swap away).

I checked ebay and models are going for $100 but I THINK that doesn't include the management software which is a huge PITA to buy. Don't want to deal with buying support/software to run my F'n network.

EDIT: I checked the Infortrend and they only support 2/4. No point in going for the 8GBps.
 
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I've worked with some fibre switches that have management software in order to run, if there are some that are not the case that's what I'd like to use. I hate having to purchase software in order to run a damn device.

Why would having/not having a zoning license matter?

I would PREFER a GUI of some sort because I'm a bad/lazy user. I can do command line without a problem. Simplicity is all.
 
Personally, I never never used a gui.

Zoning only matters if you want, kindof like the features of vlans on fc.
It lets you limits who can talk to who over the switch.
 
Then zoning isn't so big a deal then. All of the Fibre SAN devices are full open to the FrontEnd server which will be over dual gigabit to the clients.

Of course I'll need to pick up some decent fibre channel adapters. Anyone have any good recommendations for PCI-X and PCI-Express ones?
 
I never had any luck with the pcix qlogic ones, always giving me problems.

elmulex and qlogic pcie ones I haven't had any issues with.
 
patrickdk said:
I never had any luck with the pcix qlogic ones, always giving me problems.

elmulex and qlogic pcie ones I haven't had any issues with.
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Any makes and models you prefer? Any of them work with Linux especially debian.
 
qlogic 2462 would be a good place to start my omni-os san is running great with these. From what i have heard the qlogic drivers are built into just about everything so you should not have any problems.

If you need a swtihc the brocade 200E is what I have been using, it is cheap and has been working great.
 
Modder man said:
qlogic 2462 would be a good place to start my omni-os san is running great with these. From what i have heard the qlogic drivers are built into just about everything so you should not have any problems.

If you need a swtihc the brocade 200E is what I have been using, it is cheap and has been working great.
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Do the brocade's need any licensing to work or are they good 2 go out of the box?
 
the need licensing, if you buy one make sure it includes the liscensing. For refernce the one i bought about a month ago cost me $100 with 16 liscenses and SFP's. Most likely if it has 16 sfp's installed it will have 16 liscenses. I would still doublecheck with the seller to make sure though.
 
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