10Gbit FCIP Hardware

bigredshark · 4 Sep 2008 at 17:34

A quick and relatively basic question, does anybody know of a FCIP gateway/router which support 10Gig Ethernet for the IP side. It seems cisco haven't come up with an MDS IP Services blade which does it yet so I'm slightly short of ideas...

Or has anybody seen the Cisco Nexus converged datacenter switches with their FCoE stuff.....

Vanilla · 4 Sep 2008 at 17:49

Nope. The only other brand I would trust is Brocade and their 7500E is only GigE and their blades are only currently GigE for FCIP.

Why do you need 10GE on the IP side? Unless you have something super like DWDM the link is likely not going to be able to handle that amount of data even with all the compression gubbins turned on. What are you trying to do?

Do you want me to ask Cisco and Brocade when they are likely to bring out 10GE on the FCIP blades or appliances? I talk to them both every so often.

Edit: or if you tell me what you're trying to do I can see what their recommendations are.

bigredshark · 4 Sep 2008 at 20:19

I'm blessed with DWDM on dark fibre between all our core datacenters so bandwidth isn't a problem. Essentially I'm moving more infrastructure on to SAN storage and I both need to replicate between datacenters and I'm looking at backing up snapshots to remote SANs as well. 1Gig FCIP is working well in our pilots at the moment but given the volumes of data I don't think it's a viable longer term solution.

It looks like I'm off to see Cisco next week anyway so I'll have a chat then, just wanted to check I hadn't missed something which was on the market.

Chief Wiggum · 5 Sep 2008 at 16:33

This kinda market is a bit over my head, but had a quick leaf through the Cisco Product Guide:

They have MDS9000 Modules: DS-x9304 - MDS 9000 4 Port 10-Gbps FC Module - take it that it's not that?

Kev

Vanilla · 5 Sep 2008 at 17:11

That's 10Gbps Fibre, he's after 10Gb ethernet.

Fibre Channel SAN >>> IP Connection-----------DWDM-----------IP Connection >>>>>Fibre Channel SAN.

RSR · 5 Sep 2008 at 17:27

I though 10Gb was a iffy over ethernet? Hence why they use fibre :confused:

Vanilla · 5 Sep 2008 at 18:26

andyd said:
I though 10Gb was a iffy over ethernet? Hence why they use fibre

FC is a much more efficient and faster protocol. The jump to FC was due to the speed advantage it provided many years ago.

When Ethernet was slow FC offered a much faster way of getting data and it became necessary where storage arrays were present due to the amount of data being served (SAN's). FC has bcome the standard for SAN's and enterprise storage.

iSCSI then came along and allowed people to provision block data over ethernet quite efficiently and cheaply (didn't need HBA's or FC switches). Take up on iSCSI has been 'ok'.

Next thing is FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) where you can keep the FC protocol but use ethernet. So we can use the 10Gbps but keep the protocol

edit: Just to clarify exactly why we are talking about ethernet here - the reason bigredshark (correct me if i'm wrong) is looking for 10GigE is for inter-site connectivity. He will have a SAN at each site and the only way to link them will be IP into the DWDM devices or IP Network. SAN ---IP LINK---SAN. Likely he already has all this in place but over a few 1GigE links. Over time more and more data is being replicated between the SANs and you need more bandwidth, hence the need for 10GigE.

Stolly · 8 Sep 2008 at 21:14

With the Nortel gear you can bond 1Gig links on the IST's. I've had 4Gig aggregate in the past. Might be an option.

I'm sure they have 10gig modules now too. Left that area 18 months ago....

bigredshark · 19 Sep 2008 at 17:26

Well, I had a long meeting with Cisco today...and the line seems to be don't hold your breath for 10Gb FCIP because they'd really prefer to sell you one of the big Nexus switches and do FCOE. Which leaves me in a corner really, bite the bullet and go for FCOE (and the Nexus switches, which no one I know has worked with yet) or give up and just run the SAN seperately from the IP side and dedicate it some DWDM wavelengths...how boring...

Vanilla · 19 Sep 2008 at 19:05

Dedicate some DWDM. I think FCOE is too new personally..........

If you do go the Nexus route demand some references you can visit or talk to before buying.

bigredshark · 19 Sep 2008 at 19:41

Vanilla said:
Dedicate some DWDM. I think FCOE is too new personally..........

If you do go the Nexus route demand some references you can visit or talk to before buying.

We would but I think they're fairly pointless, Cisco will always have someone willing to sing their praises for a discount on their next deal (God knows we do it enough).

I strongly suspect it'll be seperate wavelengths in the end, a shame as in theory FCOE would be a big win, really drops down the amount of kit we need having a unified fabric (which would do wonders for our power consumption)