Using Fiber/Copper Connections

[adhillon]

I am mulling over the options to connect the various components, and would welcome suggestions and feedback.

The planned configuration includes 2 switches for redundancy.

#1 [Fiber & Copper]
connect the Open-e storage server via 2Gb fiber to the switch switch
connect application servers with 1Gb copper
-- which switch to use?
#2 [Copper only]
Use port bonding (2 Gb) for storage server, use 1Gb connections for application servers.
#3 [Fiber only]
User older 2Gb fiber HBAs for storage and application servers

I am leaning towards #2 because of the ease and pricing, but #3 looks good too.

Your thoughts, please.

[gharding]

We have done about 6 months of testing using the same options, and based on performnce we have choosen the optiic fibre solution (option 3).

The main thing to be aware of are that the fibre cards in the DSS server need to be specific qlogic and if you want to assign LUN's to specific clients by their WWN number then version 1.21.DB00000000.2722 is perfect only for the 2GB Qlogic Cards. We are using the DSS server as a primary storage that has SQL, Exchange, Vmware machines etc.. and have had no problems. Average Read/Write 270MB/s

At the moment we are testing the latest version with Qlogic 4GB cards and it all works well except you can not assign LUN's to specific WWN's, hopefully this will be fixed soon. Average read/write speeds with the 4GB cards is 570MBs.

Gavin