FCIP and MDS

[thomas.chen]

I have a requirement to provide a distance backup solution for my HDS Truecopy application. We are looking at FCIP as a solution for this. What features on the MDS can I use to control the bandwidth requirements and quality of my TCP connection?

[tblancha]

In the actual commands used to configure FCIP, you can control how much bandwidth and how TCP behaves.

In the FCIP profile, you can configure the min and max bandwidth, the congestion window monitoring, the keepalive timeout, retransmissions and timeout, whether path mtu discovery is used, and the buffer size. Mostly you want only to specify the max and min bandwidth and use the defaults. But if you specify a min bandwidth, then the MDS will not go thru what is known as TCP slow start.

We also offer fibre channel congestion control and can give as many (into the thousands) Buffer to Buffer credits to the HDS arrays. The 16 port FC blade can give 255 credits without a additional license. And the VSAN technology can be used to separate the traffic for truecopy from other I/O.