Storage Area Networking

Storage Area Network

Three high level components
Storage Arrays
SAN Switches
Host Bus Adapters (HBAs)

Storage Arrays
Physical Disk Enclosures
offers block level storage access to servers
can be JBOD or RAID
typically multiple levels of redundacy
Redundant power, disks, I/O controllers,etc.
SAN is not to be confused with DAS or NAS
Direct Attached Storage (DAS)
Servers local physical disks
Network Attached Storage (NAS)
NFS & CIFS/SMB file shares
Typically support three interfaces
Fibre channel (FC) - most common
iSCSI - low to mid-range arrays
Native FCoE - newer arrays

SAN Switches
Connect servers to storage
traditionally FC to FC switches
servers is called the "initiator"
storage is called the "target"
Like IP routers can do protocol conversion
FC to iSCSI
FC to FCoE
FC to FCIP
Directors vs. Switches
Directors are just bigger switches
Higher port density
Higher redundacy (power, supervisors ,line cards)

Host Bus Adapters (HBAs)

NIC card for SAN
Connects servers and storage to SAN Switches
Typically three types of HBAs
Fibre Channel HBAs
SAN traffic only
1/2/4/8/16 Gbps
iSCSI HBAs
1/10 Gbps LAN plus iSCSI hardware offload
FCoE Converged Network Adapters (CNA)
E.g "Unified Fabric"
10Gbps LAN plus FCoE hardware offload
Multiple generations of cards

Example

Nexus 7000 & FCoE

Nexus 7K is an Ethernet Switch only
Does not support native FC like 5k
Does however support FCoE
N7K FCoE Requirements
Supported only on F1 and F2 modules
F2 currently requires SUP 2/2E and 6.1(1)
Storage must live in its own VDC
Special "storage" VDC
like an MDS inside on N7K