Native fibre channel using SL cards on ONS 15454.

[stephen2615]

Greetings,

I normally hang out in the Storage Networking forum but I thought this would be a good spot to ask a question.

We current have a dark fibre connection between our sites and have issues with our Brocade switches (yeah, they should be MDS) with buffer zero problems. We want to add more bandwidth for our ISL's and we have a couple of ONS 15454's hanging around in racks in our datacentres.. I have been looking at the SL cards for the 15454 and would like to know if anyone has had success with them. I need to do synchronous True Copy between the storage at both sites for a new project. We are using async now but that wont be good enough.

Any comments would be welcome.

Stephen

[lisa.hall]

The SL-Series Card is a four-port, 1.0625- or 2.125-Gbps Fibre Channel/FICON card.So the bandwidth can be increased upto 2.125 Gbps.Refer URL

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/hw/modules/ps2710/products_data_sheet09186a00801b97a7.html

[tsim496]

Stephen,

I don't have any SL cards in production, but do have ML cards, and a myriad of TXP/MXP's on MSTP platforms.

I can tell you, the ML card does a decent job with distance extension is turned on. I have a few STS-24's extended across 400-500KM span lengths for TAPE drives across ML cards and see consistently high throughput.

Measured latency across a 70km span was about 600us with an ML card. Pretty close to an equivalent circuit built across a Muxponder.

I would venture to say, the only concern that you may have with synchronous replication is the latency.

Regards,

Tom.