MPIO with fibre channel?

[Robotbeat]

So, does DSS do MPIO with fibre channel? I have a customer that wants to do this. This is pretty important for them.



Also, does anyone here have some general benchmarks regarding SATA (7200 rpm) vs. SAS (15k) performance (random and sequential) and RAID 5 vs RAID 10 performance.

Also, how does a 7200 rpm SATA drive RAID 10 array stack up against a 15000 rpm SAS drive RAID 5 array?

[To-M]

Currently no MPIO with FC.

I believe there are posting on the SATA and SAS speeds - look at page 3 and on starting with the user nonarkitten.



http://forum.open-e.com/showthread.p...ATA+SAS+speeds

[Robotbeat]

Is MPIO Fibre on the roadmap?

Also, what is it called where you use two separate ethernet switches with bonding (802.3ad), so you have no single point of failure? Is there a standard for implementing this, or is it kind of a proprietary thing? Do Dell PowerConnect gigaBit switches do this?

[Robotbeat]

Also, thanks for the quick reply, Todd!

[To-M]

MPIO is on our road map. We have had some issues with the kernel version and getting Qlogic to assist on this as well. We need more time.

Concerning the bonding I would say the balance rr as I know that 802.3ad uses the LACP and that you have to group the ports together unless the switches talk to each other and you can join them on their ports. 802.3ad does provide path failover like balance rr just that I know you have to be on the same port group.

[Robotbeat]

On page 21 on the Open-E/VMWare best practices white paper, it looks like the drawing implies that multipathing DOES work with Open-E DSS. What is it saying? Our customer doesn't really care about the Fibre channel initiator on the DSS box, so MPIO isn't important for that. (just to clarify)

[To-M]

I agree with you that this is miss leading but as I know (please don't quote me on this) VMware does not have an iSCSI MPIO document from my research. I heard that they will in there next release 4.0.

We would need to ask a VMware expert from the forum who would know this.

Virtual Iron can do this but we are only to find out through one of our customers and they sent Virtual Iron the how to . Though they will have this for 2009 we depend allot on the customers to assist all of us.