Director Performance - McDATA StorageWorks 2/140 - Director Switch Planning Manual

Director
Performance
Directors provide the following general performance features:
• High bandwidth - Ports on Intrepid-series directors provide
full-duplex serial data transfer at a rate of 1.0625, 2.1250, or
10.2000 gigabits per second (Gbps).
• Low communication overhead - Fibre Channel protocol provides
efficient use of transmission bandwidth, reduces interlocked
handshakes across the communication interface, and efficiently
implements low-level error recovery mechanisms. This results in
little communication overhead in the protocol and a director bit
error rate (BER) less than one bit error per trillion (10
• High-availability - To ensure an availability of 99.999%, director
design provides a redundant configuration of critical components
with automatic failure detection and notification. Multiple FRUs
(logic cards, power supplies, and cooling fans) provide
redundancy in case of failure. If an active FRU fails, the backup
FRU takes over operation automatically (failover) to maintain
director and Fibre Channel link operation. High availability is
also provided through concurrent firmware upgrades and spare
or unused Fibre Channel ports.
• Low latency - For 1.0625 Gbps frame traffic, the latency is less
than 2.5 microseconds between transmission of a frame at a
source port to receipt of the frame at the corresponding
destination port (with no port contention). For 2.1250 and 10.2000
Gbps frame traffic, the latency is less than 2.0 microseconds.
• Local control - Actions taking place at a device N_Port seldom
affect operation of other ports, therefore servers need to maintain
little or no information about other connected devices in a SAN.
• Multiple topology support - Directors support both point-to-
point and multiswitch fabric topologies and indirectly support
arbitrated loop topology.
— Point-to-point topology provides a single direct connection
between two device N_Ports. This topology supports
bidirectional transmission between source and destination
ports. Through dynamic switching, directors configure
different point-to-point transmission paths. In all cases,
connected N_Ports use 100% of the available bandwidth.
Introduction to McDATA Multi-Protocol Products
Introduction to McDATA Multi-Protocol Products
12
1
) bits.
1-7