Interoperability Testing - Avaya VSP 9000 Technical Configuration Manual

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Interoperability testing

The interoperability testing focused primarily on verifying throughput under normal conditions and then
simulating various fault conditions to test high availability. During interoperability testing, the VSP 9000
communicated with two Coraid EtherDrive SRX-Series storage appliances.
Coraid uses RAID technology as a method of logically treating several hard drives as one unit to improve
performance and/or provide redundancy. Coraid EtherDrive SRX-Series storage appliances support all
standard RAID types (0, 1, 5, 6, and 10). The Coraid EtherDrive SRX-Series are block storage RAID
appliances with front loading, hot-swappable SATA, SAS, and SSD disk drives. You can use each
EtherDrive SRX appliance individually or in RAID sets.
The Coraid EtherDrive SRX-Series use the ATA over Ethernet (AoE) protocol to communicate between
the logical storage devices and servers across a standard Ethernet network. AoE enables you to share
disk drives through a standard Ethernet network. AoE arranges the communication that would normally
take place between a server and a disk drive into data packets called datagrams and sends these across
Layer 2 Ethernet with minimal overhead. Datagrams are addressed to storage devices using their
Ethernet MAC addresses.
AoE does not run over high level networking protocols like IP so AoE datagrams cannot be routed. The
data packets can travel across the switches that make up an Ethernet LAN, but routers cannot send them
to another network and devices outside of the LAN cannot communicate with them. This provides an
inherent layer of security. AoE is designed to run on a datagram networking protocol such as Ethernet.
Ethernet makes a best effort attempt to deliver datagrams. AoE has developed a sophisticated
congestion avoidance algorithm to maximize throughput while avoiding dropped frames. AoE can quickly
recover from lost datagrams on the network due to congestion so no data loss is guaranteed.
For technical support on Coraid EtherDrive SRX-Series storage appliances, contact Coraid's technical
support at their Web site:
http://www.coraid.com/support/customer_support
The Web site provides documentation, frequently asked questions, AoE tools for Linux, and contact
telephone numbers.
VSP 9000 with Coraid EtherDrive SRX-Series
Dec 2010 10
Storage Appliances TCG