Internets of Interest:16 Jan 10

Collection of use­ful, rel­ev­ant or inane places on the the Internets for 16 Jan 10:

Internets of Interest:8 Dec 09

Collection of use­ful, rel­ev­ant or inane places on the the Internets for 8 Dec 09:

Why Does iSCSI Use TCP Instead of IP ?

The iSCSI pro­tocol car­ries block data from stor­age array to server. Typically, that is inside a data centre where loss is not a prob­lem. So why use TCP and have all that overhead ?

The Case Against FCoE and Fibrechannel — a Reasonably Complete View

A num­ber of stor­age blog­gers have been ques­tion­ing the rel­ev­ance of FCoE and why would you bother with it. Given the size of mar­ket­ing budgets push­ing FCoE and the real­ity dis­tor­tion this gen­er­ates, lets look at the case AGAINST FCoE.

FCoE and the Return of Spanning Tree

One of the most amus­ing parts about Fibre Channel over Ethernet(FCoE) is that Spanning Tree is mak­ing a tri­umphant comeback. And I am talk­ing a Roman style parade after the gates to the city have been built and the streets lined with gold.

Are You Ready to Purchase a Brocade Ethernet Switch ? What ?

One of the more amus­ing byproducts of the FCoE mar­ket­ing push, is that Brocade has announced that they will pro­du­cing FCoE switches for their cus­tom­ers. So, are you ready to buy a Brocade Ethernet switch ?

Article: The Future of Storage — Seven Fundamental Reasons Why FCoE Will Fail

An art­icle I wrote on con­cerns about FCoE adop­tion has been pos­ted at The Future of Storage and reviews seven reas­ons why FCoE might not achieve crit­ical mass in the mar­ket­place.
Feedback appre­ci­ated. Is any­one con­sid­er­ing using FCoE in real life ?

iSCSI Network Designs: Part 5 — iSCSI Multipathing, Host Bus Adapters, High Availability and Redundancy

This Post is Part of a Series  —  click for list on iscsi» In iSCSI Part 3  —  Server Side  —  iSCSI Host Bus Adapters and IP Performance I looked at how server side issues would affect the traffic gen­er­ated on a per server basis. I recom­men­ded that you use iSCSI HBAs for high intens­ity serv­ers to meet the high levels of per­form­ance.
The next […]

Don’t Tell Me iSCSI Is Complicated if Fibrechannel Looks Like This

I am work­ing my way through the next couple of art­icles on iSCSI Network Design. Its get­ting com­plic­ated is some ways. I noticed this art­icle todayhttp://​vinf​.net/​2​0​0​8​/​0​4​/​0​9​/​h​o​w​-​d​o​e​s​-​a​n​-​h​p​-​f​i​b​r​e​-​c​h​a​n​n​e​l​-​v​i​r​t​u​a​l​-​c​o​n​n​e​c​t​-​m​o​dule-work/ explain­ing how Fibrechannel fail­over work for a HP Fibrechannel Virtual Connect in a blade server chassis. It is all rather con­fus­ing, and seem­ingly no more com­plex that the iSCSI net­work design. […]

iSCSI Network Designs: Part 4 — Fibrechannel Integration

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 […]

iSCSI Network Designs: Part 3 — Server Side — iSCSI Host Bus Adapters and IP Performance

This Post is Part of a Series  —  click for list on iscsi» I have been research­ing iSCSI impe­ment­a­tions on the server to try and under­stand the dffer­ence between them and to come to grips with how they work. This art­icle looks to com­pare the vari­ous meth­ods of con­nect­ing to a iSCSI net­work.
It seems that many people do […]

Network Dictionary — iSCSI

iSCSI  —  (eye-​​​​scuzzee)
 – a pro­tocol designed to trans­port SCSI block data across an IP net­work thus allow­ing a single net­work infra­struc­ture.
 –  a pro­tocol used by net­work­ing teams so they don’t have to under­stand stor­age (thanks to Jeff Darcy at Pl​.atyp​.us)
com­pare with Fibrechannel

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.

iSCSI Network Designs: Part 2 — Simple Scaling

This Post is Part of a Series  —  click for list on iscsi» We have looked at a simple iSCSI net­work solu­tion in iSCSI Network Designs Part 1. We have kept the stor­age traffic sep­ar­ated from our data for oper­a­tional reas­ons. But we are lim­ited to 1GB/​​s and the port dens­ity of the switch.
List of Posts in this […]

iSCSI Network Designs: Part 1 — Introduction and Basics

This Post is Part of a Series  —  click for list on iscsi» I am work­ing on a Data Centre that has more than 500 serv­ers and we are con­sid­er­ing what our stor­age strategy should be. This is why I have been look­ing at FCoE and iSCSI and estab­lish­ing the bene­fits (or not).
My next few posts will be a “stream of […]