Brocade Communications Systems 53-0001575-01 manual Fos

SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm

2.9.1SUMMA RY

A variety of SAN designs topologies and port counts can be deployed today using Brocade switch. The Fabric Operating System provides for auto-discovery and configuration of the SAN as devices are added and new switches included in an existing SAN. The user should understand his environment, the components in the SAN, the relationship between hosts and storage, usage patterns and his needs for reli- ability and redundancy when building a SAN. Information in this section can be used as guidance in choosing a design. The safe limits for reliable SAN sizes supported as of this publication date are shown the Table 1 below.

FIGURE 16. SAN Topologies and Port Counts Supported by Brocade

	Switch	FOS	Port Count
Fabric Type		Version		ISL	Comments
	Count		Maximum
		See Note
Meshed	16	2.1.9g+	220	Single	Port count max is with single ISL links in the mesh. Lower port counts if multiple ISL
		2.2.2+			links are used.
Star	18-20	2.1.9g+	224	One to each core	Fewer switches can be used and the SAN can be expanded as to maximum configura-
		2.2.2+		from edge	tion as more devices are added. Can still take advantage of locality if that is
				switch	known.however SAN allows for equal cost paths from any initiator to target.
Three Tier	20-24	2.1.9g+	192-262	2 or more	Figure 10 design: 190 host ports and 72 storage ports
		2.2.2+			Note: devices are not generally attached to the middle tier though it could be used for
					device attach (add 12ports)

NOTE: FOS release information. These versions of FOS are the recommended versions to use when targeting fabrics of the size defined in this table. Later releases should work as well as denoted by the (+) symbol. The 2.2 Tree contains additional licensed features not found in the 2.1 Tree of releases, however, in terms of compatibility and bug fixes the 2.1.9g and the 2.2.2 version are equivalent.

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