Data Networks — More Reliable to Than Storage Networks ?

I was par­ti­cip­at­ing in a stor­age design dis­cus­sion and a Storage per­son threw up their most com­mon com­plaint about net­work­ing — “we don’t know how to build reli­able net­works”. Let me take a shot at that.

Investment

Between net­work­ing and stor­age, there is a large dif­fer­ence in scale and invest­ment. The Storage mar­kets have been able to make sub­stan­tial invest­ments ( by net­work­ing stand­ards, excess­ive amounts of money) in high scale equip­ment and redund­ancy, pos­sibly because the busi­ness case was easy to make. AKA if the disk stop work­ing, everything stops work­ing ergo give me lots of money to stop that from happening.

Networking has a thirty year ped­i­greee where near enough was usu­ally good enough and this atti­tude is what many of us have inher­ited today. It is a his­tor­ical and envir­on­mental real­ity rather than a short­com­ing of our own mak­ing. In my exper­i­ence, Management still feels that a short out­age on the data side is accept­able. Until that atti­tude changes and the invest­ment matches the real­ity this will remain true.

For example, when I tell man­age­ment that build­ing a five sigma net­work solu­tion will cost 500K, their eyes bug out and they have a fit, but when the Storage folks pops up with a 1.2 mil­lion for equi­val­ent bene­fits, they don’t even flinch.

Meet HA Networking experts

If you want to see really top notch net­work­ing, meet Data Centre Networking people fully focussed on deliv­er­ing very high qual­ity solu­tions. Get a high level Data Centre expert in your stor­age team and you should notice a real dif­fer­ence in atti­tude and delivery.

Going for­ward, Data Centre net­work­ing is going to become an expert field in its own right (if it isn’t already)

FC net­works are often quite small

Also, remem­ber that FC net­works are quite small, com­pared to Ethernet net­works. A couple of hun­dred FC ports is not a big net­work com­pared to a DCE that has thou­sands. Complexity, in my exper­i­ence, increases expo­nen­tially with size.

I feel that part of FC’s even­tual demise will be its inab­il­ity to scale bey­ond sev­eral hun­dred ports.

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