Friday, March 12, 2010

iSCSI Network Designs: Part 4 — Fibrechannel Integration

May 11, 2008 by Greg Ferro · Leave a Comment 

This Post is Part of a Series — click for list on iscsi» , iscsi»

Its pos­sible that you would already have some Fibrechannel in your estate. Perhaps the cost of Fibrechannel for some new serv­ers is too much when you cal­cu­late the HBA and Fibrechannel switch port costs, or you don’t need the com­plex­ity of Fibrechannel for a simple server setup. Lets look at options for con­nect­ing to the Fibrechannel nte­works.

There are a num­ber of options avail­able. The first is to invest­ig­ate whether your SAN sup­ports an iSCSI option. Many of the lar­ger SAN have nat­ive cap­ab­il­ity. The neg­at­ive of this approach is that you will only be able to access resources on that SAN. Most likely you want to be able to access the resources of any Fibrechannel SAN so that yuo have max­imum flexibility.

Many Fibrechannel switches now sup­port iSCSI to Fibrechannel is some form or another. You could review the doc­u­ment­a­tion for the Cisco MDS9000 as a start­ing point for iSCSI to Fibrechannel integ­ra­tion. These switches become iSCSI to Fibrechannel routers (not dis­sim­ilar to eth­er­net to token ring bridges in the past). They con­nect to the IP/​Ethernet network.

Consider the fol­low­ing dia­gram to out­line how it would integ­rate with your exist­ing infrastructure.

iscsi-fc-integration.jpg

A short out­line of the some of the rel­ev­ant features:

  • redund­ancy iSCSI to Fibrechannel routers to be deployed to redund­ant switches
  • there can be as many stor­age arrays as the Fibrechannel net­work can handle.
  • serv­ers will see the iSCSI tar­gets in the same way as nat­ive iSCSI SAN.

Conclusion

Connecting to Fibrechannel net­works using iSCSI is pos­sible and often a fea­ture that is a part of the equip­ment that you have already. If you have more than one Fibrechannel only SAN on your Fibrechannel net­works, con­sider using a iSCSI router so that you can con­nect to any SAN resource in your Fibrechannel estate.

You should also con­sider using any other iSCSI options for you SAN, but pos­sibly the external option will work bet­ter than an option that is spe­cific to just one vendor or SAN.

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