Cisco Nexus 7000 Design Manual page 12

FlexPod Design Details
Figure 2 FlexPod Distinct Uplink Design with Clustered Data ONTAP
*The FAS22xx fully supports IP-based storage, but does not support FCoE.
FlexPod distinct uplink design is an end-to-end Ethernet transport solution supporting multiple LAN and
SAN protocols, most notably FCoE. The solution provides a unified 10GbE-enabled fabric, defined by
dedicated FCoE uplinks and dedicated Ethernet uplinks between the Cisco UCS Fabric Interconnects
and the Cisco Nexus switches, as well as converged connectivity between the NetApp storage devices
and the same multipurpose Cisco Nexus platforms.
The distinct uplink design does not employ a dedicated SAN switching environment and requires no
direct Fibre Channel connectivity. The Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches are configured in N-Port ID
Virtualization (NPIV) mode, providing storage services for the FCoE-based traffic traversing its fabric.
As illustrated, link aggregation technologies play an important role, providing improved aggregate
bandwidth and link resiliency across the solution stack. The NetApp storage controllers, Cisco Unified
Computing System, and Cisco Nexus 7000 platforms support active port channeling using 802.3ad
standard Link Aggregation Control Protocol (LACP). Port channeling is a link aggregation technique
offering link fault tolerance, and traffic distribution (load balancing) for improved aggregate bandwidth
across the member ports. In addition, the Cisco Nexus 7000 Series Switches feature virtual PortChannel
(vPC) capabilities. The vPC allows links that are physically connected to two different Cisco Nexus 7000
series devices to appear as a single "logical" port channel to a third device, essentially offering device
fault tolerance. The vPC addresses aggregate bandwidth, link, and device resiliency. The Cisco UCS
Fabric Interconnects and NetApp FAS controllers benefit from the Cisco Nexus vPC abstraction, gaining
link and device resiliency as well as full utilization of an non-blocking Ethernet fabric.
VMware vSphere 5.1 on FlexPod with Nexus 7000 Using FCoE
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