San Routers - McDATA StorageWorks 2/140 - Director Switch Planning Manual

Introduction to McDATA Multi-Protocol Products
1

SAN Routers

McDATA Products in a SAN Environment - Planning Manual
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• Up to 32 duplex SFP fiber-optic port transceivers. Tri-rate
shortwave laser (1.0625, 2.1250, or 4.2500 Gbps) transceivers are
available for transferring data over multimode fiber-optic cable.
Tri-rate longwave laser transceivers are available for transferring
data over singlemode fiber-optic cable. Fiber-optic cables attach
to switch port transceivers with duplex LC connectors.
NOTE: The Sphereon 4700 Fabric Switch can be purchased at a discount price
with the Flexport Technology feature. The switch is delivered with only 16
ports enabled. When additional port capacity is required, the remaining ports
are enabled (in eight-port increments) through purchase of a PFE key.
The switch front panel provides a combined initial machine load and
reset (RESET) button, Ethernet LAN connector, port status LEDs,
green power (PWR) LED, and amber system error (ERR) LED.
The switch rear panel provides a 9-pin DSUB maintenance port for
connection to a local terminal or remote terminal. Although the port
is typically used by authorized maintenance personnel, operations
personnel can use the port to configure switch network addresses.
The Fibre Channel protocol was designed for high-performance
channel and storage applications within the limited confines of a data
center. However, the protocol is not suited for long-distance
applications between multiple, geographically-dispersed SANs or
data centers. Conversely, transmission control protocol/Internet
protocol (TCP/IP) is well suited to provide dynamic routing for
complex, geographically-dispersed networks.
SAN routers provide multi-protocol solutions to this problem by
unifying storage (FCP) and networking (TCP/IP) architectures. These
protocols include metropolitan Fibre Channel protocol (mFCP),
Internet Fibre Channel protocol (iFCP), and Internet small computer
systems interface (iSCSI), provided at up to Gigabit Ethernet (GbE)
bandwidth. SAN routers are low port count, high-bandwidth
products that provide extended distance and multi-protocol access to
Fibre Channel SANs, and should be installed to: