posted Nov 18, 2013, 3:40 PM by Rick McGee
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updated May 5, 2014, 5:22 PM
]
What makes up a SAN?
- Three high level components
- Storage Arrays
- SAN Switches
- Host Bus Adapters (HBA's)
- Storage Arrays
- Physical disk enclosures
- Offers block level storage access to servers
- Can be JBOD (just a bunch of disks) or RAID
- Typically multiple levels of redundancy
- Redundant Power, Disks, I/O controllers, etc.
- SAN is not to be confused with DAS or NAS (File Level Storage need OS)
- Direct Attached Storage (DAS)
- Servers local physical disks
- Network Attacked Storage (NAS)
- NFS and CIFS/SMB file shares
- Storage Arrays Typically support three interfaces types
- Fibre Channel (FC) - this is the most common
- iSCSI -low to mid-range arrays
- Native FCoE - newer arrays
- 10GE ports dedicated for storage E.g. N5K/N7K
- SAN Switches
- Connect servers to storage
- Traditionally FC to FC switches
- Server is called the INITIATOR
- Storages is call the TARGET
- Like IP routers, can do protocol conversions
- FC to iSCSI
- FC to FCOE
- FC to FCIP
- Directors vs. Switches
- Director class switches just have more:
- High Port density
- Higher Redundancy (power, supervisors, line cards)
- Host Bus Adapters (HBA's)
- NIC card for SAN
- Connect server and storage to SAN switches
- Typically three types of HBA's
- Fibre Channel HBA's
- SAN Traffic Only
- 1/2/4/8/16Gbps
- iSCSI HBA's
- 1/10Gbps LAN plus iSCSI hardware offload
- FCoE Converged Network Adapter (CNA)
- E.g. UNIFIED FABRIC
- 10Gbps LAN Plus FCoE hardware offload
- Different generations of adapters.
- Nexus 5500 Unified Ports
- Nexus 5548UP and 5596UP support "Unified Ports"
- All ports can run as 1/10GE or 1/2/4/8 Native FC
- N5K UP Caveats
- FC ports start at the end of the module and count down
- Changing mode from Ethernet to FC requires a reboot
- "slot 1" (5596 will have 4 Slots)
- "Port 24-32 type fc"
- Nexus 7000 and FCoE
- Nexus 7K is an Ethernet switch only
- Doesn't support native FC like the 5K's
- Does however support FCoE
- N7K FCoE requirements
- Supported only on F1 and F2 modules
- F2 currently requires SUP2/2E and 6.1(1)
- Storage must live in it's own VDC
- Special "Storage VDC
- Like an MDS inside of N7K
- DC LAB Exam SAN Hardware
- MDS 9222i (i= IP SAN protocols) v5.2(2)
- The version is NX-OS not SAN OS
- Nexus 5548UP v5.1(3)
- SFP Optics for Fibre Channel at layer 1 are different then Ethernet
- Nexus 7009 v6.0(2) with SUP1, 10GE F1 module , 10GE M1 module
- UCS-6248 Fabric Interconnects v2.0(1x)
- Palo and Emulex mezzanine CNA (Converged Network Adapters)
- Cisco Data Center Manger Software v5.2(2)
- Used to manage the SAN network
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