Sample Ip Storage Network Configuration Setup; Hp P4000 Multi-Site San Networking Requirements; Network Latency - HP P4000 SAN Technical White Paper

Sample IP storage network configuration setup

Although the typical configuration blueprint is very similar from one switch manufacturer to the next, you should
always consult the switch manufacturer's configuration reference guides for specific configuration tasks. As a general
rule, HP recommends the following configuration tasks to implement your IP storage network:
1. Cable the switches with multiple interconnect cables for redundancy and performance. If the switches do not
auto-create the trunk between the switches, configure the trunking protocols. Plan for enough trunk ports to
support your expected inter-switch storage traffic.
2. Enable flow control support on the switches. This must be done globally on the switch or flow control will not be
negotiated on the network. Verify flow control on the servers and storage nodes.
3. Optionally, enable jumbo frame support on the switches. This must be done globally on the switch or per VLAN,
otherwise jumbo frames will not be negotiated on the network and can cause issues.
4. Set up the appropriate VLAN configurations as necessary.
5. Enable Rapid Spanning Tree Protocol for the VLAN configured in Step #4.
6. For Cisco switches, HP recommends setting the port mode to access. Configure the IP routes necessary to route
traffic from the IP storage network into the LAN.
7. Connect all storage nodes and servers to the switches with Cat5e, Cat6, Fibre or SFP+.
8. Set all GbE ports on the switches, servers, and storage nodes to auto-negotiate speed and duplex mode. Verify
that all ports are negotiated to full-duplex 1000 or 10,000 Mb/s, accordingly.
9. Optionally, set all ports on the servers and storage nodes to use jumbo frames.
10. Set up ALB NIC bonding on all the storage nodes. Assign static IP addresses to the bond interfaces.
11. Set up the NICs on the host servers. For Windows, set up individual static IP addresses on each NIC. For other
operating systems, use the native NIC bonding configuration.
12. For optimum performance, choose NICs that support hardware TCP Offloading and TCP Checksum Offloading.
Check to make sure the OS is configured to use these features. At this time, HP does not recommend the use of
iSCSI offloading for use with the HP P4000 SAN system without a qualified HBA. HBAs that are qualified at the
time of this writing are the QLogic QLE4060c, QLE4062c and QMH4062.
13. Remove all unused protocol bindings from the NICs on your storage network. IPv6 is not supported at this time
and can be safely removed from your storage network.
14. Verify that the host servers can communicate with the storage nodes utilizing TCP and UDP traffic. For a list of
UDP and TCP ports used by HP P4000 SANs, read the SAN/iQ TCP and UDP Port Usage application note.
15. Proceed with the rest of the SAN configuration.

HP P4000 multi-site SAN networking requirements

Pay special attention to the networking configuration when building a multi-site with the HP P4000 SAN. The two
primary factors that contribute to the health of a multi-site cluster are network latency and network bandwidth.

Network latency

High network latency can be the primary cause of slow I/O performance, or worse, iSCSI target disconnects. It is
important to keep roundtrip network latency on your storage subnet below two milliseconds. Many factors can
contribute to increasing network latency, but two are most common:
•
Distance between storage cluster nodes
•
Router hops between storage cluster nodes
Configuring a multi-site cluster on a single IP subnet with Layer 2 switching will help to lower the network latency
between storage cluster nodes.
7