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Thread: Switch with fibre and ethernet?

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    Switch with fibre and ethernet?

    Please forgive me if this is (and I expect it is!) a stupid question.

    I am looking at purchasing a used SAN for shared storage which has 2 x 4Gb fibre and 2 x 8Gb fibre ports. Originally I had planned to buy a storage server with 10Gb ethernet, and a Gigabit switch with 10Gbe uplink ports, connect the server to the switch via 10Gbe and have 1Gbe out to the individual workstations however the SAN that has come up could be too good a bargain to resist.

    So with that in mind, can I do a similar thing - get a switch that has fibre ports for connecting the SAN to and then Gigabit out to each PC?

    Thanks in advance

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    Almost Ex-HEXUS Staff Jonatron's Avatar
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    Re: Switch with fibre and ethernet?

    As I understand it, if the SAN has 4/8Gb fibre ports, then it's fibre channel - which allows a device to talk to the disks over fibre. So you'd need a server with a fibre channel HBA, and the server would do the sharing (eg windows file sharing or samba). Then you've got a choice of how to network that server:
    - 10Gb SFP+ Fibre NIC in the server and a switch with a 10Gb SFP+ Fibre port (probably expensive to do!)
    - 10GbE NIC in the server and a switch with a 10GbE port
    - GbE, you could have for example a 4 port GbE NIC, connected with 4 cables to a switch, and configure link aggregation, for a 4Gb link, which is likely to be the cheapest option.
    I don't know a lot about SANs though, so I'd wait for someone who knows their stuff to confirm what I said. Also it'd help if you mentioned which SAN it is you've got your eye on.

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    Re: Switch with fibre and ethernet?

    As John says you will need a fibre channel card in every server that needs to access the SAN and the workstation connect to the server - it won't be like a NAS where each individual workstation connects straight to the SAN. Fibre channel is a really expensive way of doing it so I would be asking you, how many servers you are using, how many clients and what kind of data you are storing (eg a million word documents or 100 DVD ISOs). More often than not you'll run out of IOPS on the disks before you saturate the network interface (depending on the SAN, more details would be useful).

    Butuz

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    Re: Switch with fibre and ethernet?

    Thanks both of you. It's shared storage for video editing so up to 10 streams of 220Mbps video.

    I have the option after purchasing the SAN of paying £1000 software & hardware upgrade to add 10Gbe connectivity (2 port card). My plan then would be to buy a 24 port gigabit switch with at least 2 of those ports 10Gbe to link aggregate the 2 ports from the SAN. Something like this maybe?

    http://www.universalnetworks.co.uk/p...product=J9145A

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    Re: Switch with fibre and ethernet?

    What SAN is it?

    Butuz

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    Re: Switch with fibre and ethernet?

    It's a Facilis Terrablock 24D

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    Re: Switch with fibre and ethernet?

    Quote Originally Posted by Olimain View Post
    Thanks both of you. It's shared storage for video editing so up to 10 streams of 220Mbps video.

    I have the option after purchasing the SAN of paying £1000 software & hardware upgrade to add 10Gbe connectivity (2 port card). My plan then would be to buy a 24 port gigabit switch with at least 2 of those ports 10Gbe to link aggregate the 2 ports from the SAN. Something like this maybe?

    http://www.universalnetworks.co.uk/p...product=J9145A
    http://www.facilis.com/configs.html It looks like that would work, I think the SAN was designed for clients to connect directly to it or through a switch. That particular switch you linked to only looks like it has slots for 10Gbe ports, rather than coming with it though.

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    Re: Switch with fibre and ethernet?

    Fibre Channel does not speak ethernet. It looks like you will need to go for the 10Gbe connectors to share information.
    I think you may get into concurrent connection issues as Ethernet channels will not split bandwidth evenly. 1 client running at 1Gb could hold the 10Gbe channel up.

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    Re: Switch with fibre and ethernet?

    All you probably need for your SAN is a switch (Cisco 3750 as example) with 4 SFP+ miniGBIC modules and configure each pair of fibre ports in EtherChannel - rest of your 'devices' can connect over GigE copper. That's probably the cheapest way to get you going with semi decent performance.

    How many disks are be getting with your SAN and what types? FC/SAS/SATA?

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    Re: Switch with fibre and ethernet?

    I think there maybe a Dell gigabit switch with 4 SFP ports for sale on this very forum!
    □ΞVΞ□

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    Re: Switch with fibre and ethernet?

    Thanks Jay/Spoon, so are you saying that 4Gb fibre can plug into that Cisco/Dell? I thought the SFP would have to be an ethernet SFP not a fibre channel SFP in those switches?

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