SAN Design: March 29, 2001 3:18 pm
Half of the switches are connected to form one fabric, and the other half form an identical fabric, which is completely unconnected to the first fabric. There is no single point of failure in either fabric which could cause the fabric to segment. This can be used in combination with dual attach hosts and storage to keep a solution up even when one entire fabric fails. This is generally the best
approach to take to SAN design for high availability.
FIGURE 1. This Figure shows an example of each of the types of resilient designs.
L e v e l s o f R e d u n d a n c y
S P F
Si n g l e f a b r i c , n o n - r e s i l i e n t
Si n g l e f a b r i c , r e s i l i e n t
D u a l f a b r i c , |
n o n - r e s i l i e n t |
D u a l f a b r i c , |
r e s i l i e n t |
The following discussion will be about single fabrics with resiliency. If a dual fabric, resilient design is desired (in fact, this is recom- mended), simply pick the appropriate single fabric design and build two of them.
BROCADE Technical Note | Page: 6 of 31 |