Setting up a fibre network

GodAtum · 23 Apr 2014 at 20:05

just looking online, I can see various 4GBps fibre PCI network cards for around £20 ans witches for around £50, which seem ridiculously cheap! Which ones are good?

i guess i can start with 2 cards and a switch? I'll be running from a Freenas server and Owncloud to Windows 7. Will i see a vast improvement over my current 1GBps CAt5 network?

anything I don't mind · 23 Apr 2014 at 20:52

you mean fiber channel ?

brocade is good for hba

GodAtum · 23 Apr 2014 at 21:57

yes, is HP or Qlogic any good? the brocade ones are over £100.

ecksmen · 23 Apr 2014 at 22:15

Generally the FC ports need a license, and not sure many free nas solutions offer fibre channel. Personally id just stick to iscsi and mpio.

DFish · 24 Apr 2014 at 06:03

Unless you are moving SERIOUS amounts of data then it is pointless IMHO for a home setup. Decent Cat 5 setup is more than enough for streaming.

Fish

Shad · 24 Apr 2014 at 08:07

ecksmen said:
Generally the FC ports need a license, and not sure many free nas solutions offer fibre channel.

Certainly true for switches, although most switches you'll find on eBay will have a sufficient number of ports licensed already. Things like OmniOS/OpenIndiana and Napp-it support FC, as do NexentaStor and QuadStor. There are plenty of free-as-in-beer options if you look around.

Also I can recommend QLogic adapters, the QLE2460 has good compatibility with ESXi and Windows Server (and presumably most other operating systems given its age). I use these cards with a QLogic SANbox 5600.

The bandwidth argument might hold true for most home setups, but if your NAS is capable of saturating 1GbE and you have a desire to move things about more quickly, then FC isn't the worst idea. The trouble for typical home use is that it's only for block storage - no SMB/NFS shares, we're talking LUNs only. This is SAN territory not NAS. If that works for you then crack on

RSR · 24 Apr 2014 at 10:42

I use FC (4Gb) at home for my SAN and it works perfectly for my needs. I'm also not biggest fan of iSCSI for a large number of reason.

I've been looking into 10Gb X520 cards but at the moment, they are still too expensive. As on as the local SAN performance is capable of 2GB/s +

Also I've been meaning to write a blog about the storage side of things but I've not had time to get around to it yet.

GodAtum · 24 Apr 2014 at 19:22

[RXP]Andy;26205176 said:
I use FC (4Gb) at home for my SAN and it works perfectly for my needs. I'm also not biggest fan of iSCSI for a large number of reason.

I've been looking into 10Gb X520 cards but at the moment, they are still too expensive. As on as the local SAN performance is capable of 2GB/s +

Also I've been meaning to write a blog about the storage side of things but I've not had time to get around to it yet.

Wow how was it setup? I'm mainly storing lots of medium size files (100Mb - a few GB) totaling 1TB atm. I'd just like to see how fast it can go lol.

trancesphere · 24 Apr 2014 at 19:51

If you just want to setup FC between two computers, you can skip the switch and use point to point.

If you want more than two, have a look at Brocade SilkWorm 200E switches. The base switch is supplied with 8 ports.

Also remember that NTFS volumes are not cluster aware, only one computer can access a single LUN at once. If two computers mount/online the same LUN, corruption will occur.

RSR · 25 Apr 2014 at 10:49

GodAtum said:
Wow how was it setup? I'm mainly storing lots of medium size files (100Mb - a few GB) totaling 1TB atm. I'd just like to see how fast it can go lol.

I just run OmniOS, nothing overly special, as this runs my block and file storage. The main SAN runs a Qlogic 2464 (4x 4Gb) which has 2 RAID Z1 volumes, as when I was bench marking these yielded the best results. Its connected to a Hyper V host which has a Qlogic 2462, which is multipathed (MPIO) back to the SAN. I also have a Brocade SilkWorm 200E switch in the cupboard, but I am still yet to use it.

The best results I have seen from the SAN are around 7300MB/s read but that far exceeds what the FC cards can provide. Once I get find some cheap 10Gb cards then I can move and then re-test.

What do I use it for? It stores all my files, hosts around 14 VM's which I use for various things and I also do a lot of testing for work on it.