CCIE Data Center Storage Networking Hardware Architecture

What Makes Up a SAN? Three high level components

Storage Arrays SAN Switches Host Bus Adapters (HBAs)

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Storage Arrays
Physical disk enclosures
Offers block level storage access to servers Can be JBOD or RAID Typically multiple levels of redundancy
Redundant power, disks, I/O controllers, etc.

SAN is not to be confused with DAS or NAS

Direct Attached Storage (DAS)
Servers local physical disks

Network Attached Storage (NAS)

NFS & CIFS/SMB file shares

Typically support three interfaces

Fibre Channel (FC) most common iSCSI low to mid-range arrays Native FCoE newer arrays

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SAN Switches
Connect servers to storage
Traditionally FC to FC switches Server is called the initiator Storage is called the target

Like IP routers, can do protocol conversions

FC to iSCSI FC to FCoE FC to FCIP

Directors vs. Switches

Directors are just bigger switches
Think Catalyst 6509 vs. Catalyst 2960

Higher port density Higher redundancy (power, supervisors, line cards)

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Host Bus Adapters (HBAs)

NIC card for SAN
Connects servers and storage to SAN switches

Typically three types of HBAs

Fibre Channel HBAs
SAN traffic only 1/2/4/8/16Gbps

iSCSI HBAs
1/10Gbps LAN plus iSCSI hardware offload

FCoE Converged Network Adapter (CNA)

E.g. Unified Fabric 10Gbps LAN plus FCoE hardware offload Multiple generations of cards
More on this later

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Class Hardware Diagram

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Class Hardware Topology

http://ine.co/sandiagram 1 x MDS 9222i 1 x MDS 9216i
Similar to 9222i but an older code rev.

2 x Nexus 5548UP
Native FC support plus FCoE

2 x Nexus 7010
Just FCoE, no Native FC

2 x JBODs QLogic FC HBAs Emulex FCoE CNAs UCS will be discussed later

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Nexus 5500 Unified Ports

Nexus 5548UP and 5596UP support Unified Ports
All ports can run as 1/10GigE or 1/2/4/8 Native FC

N5K UP Caveats
FC ports start at end of module and count down
E.g. 32, 31, 30, 29, etc.

Changing mode from Ethernet to FC requires a reboot

slot 1 port 24-32 type fc
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Nexus 7000 & FCoE

Nexus 7K is an Ethernet switch only
Does not support native FC like 5K Does however support FCoE

N7K FCoE requirements

Supported only on F1 and F2 modules
F2 currently requires SUP 2/2E and 6.1(1)

Storage must live in its own VDC

Special Storage VDC Like an MDS inside of N7K More on this later
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Q&A

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