SAN design help needed

[dejian007]

Hi All

I am new to the world of storage and need some help. I am setting up a design with Cisco 5600 and FEX. The design is completed. I plan to attach the SAN to the 5K. Please bear with me as these might be totally newbie questions.

My queries are:

1. Do I need a separate license on 5K to attach SAN?

2. What cables and adapters will I need?

3. Do I use ISCSI or Fibre Channel?

4. Is there difference between the hardware needed if I run Fibre Channel or FCOE?

5. Will I be running Fibre Channel to FEX connecting to the servers OR to the SAN directly connected to the 5K?

Thanks

Gordon

[Walter Dey]

Hi Gordon

Before you go into discussion about cables and licenses, you should have a clear concept, of which storage technology to use.

FC, FCoE and iSCSI are block storage technologies; your OS sees essentially a disk, or LUN !

NF, CIFS are file storage technologies; your OS sees a file system

FCoE is running on top of Ethernet, all the tools and concepts (like zoning, flogi,...) of classical FC apply

iSCSI runs on top of TCP/IP

MDS switches support classical FC (some iSCSI)

Nexus 5K supports Ethernet, FCoE, iSCSI and classical FC

Do you have a existing SAN storage environment, and if yes, which technology ? which storage device do you use ?

[Walter Dey]

This might be of interest for you:

Upcoming SNIA Webcast:
FC vs. iSCSI

US Date/Time:  Wednesday, January 31, 2018 – 11:00 am PT / 2:00 pm ET 

Register: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/663/297837

Presenters: Fred Knight, NetApp, John Kim, SNIA ESF Chair, Mellanox, Alex McDonald, SNIA ESF Vice Chair, NetApp

About the Webcast

In the enterprise, block storage typically handles the most critical applications such as database, ERP, product development, and tier-1 virtualization. The dominant connectivity option for this has long been Fibre Channel SAN (FC-SAN), but recently many customers and block storage vendors have turned to iSCSI instead. FC-SAN is known for its reliability, lossless nature, 2x FC speed bumps, and carefully tested interoperability between vendors. iSCSI is known for running on ubiquitous Ethernet networks, 10x Ethernet speed bumps, and supporting commodity networking hardware from many vendors.

Because, FCoE also delivers increasing performance as Ethernet speeds increase – and, Fibre Channel also delivers increasing performance as FC speeds increase. Historically, FC delivered speed bumps at a more rapid interval (2x bumps), while Ethernet delivered their speed bumps at a slower pace (10x bumps), but that has changed recently with Ethernet adding 2.5G, 5G, 25G, 40G, and 50G to the traditional 1G, 10G, 100G timeline.

As the storage world moves to more flash and other non-volatile memory, more cloud, and more virtualization (or more containers), it’s time to revisit one of the great IT debates: Should you deploy Fibre Channel or iSCSI? Attend this SNIA Ethernet Storage Forum webcast to learn:

• Will Fibre Channel or iSCSI deliver faster performance? Does it depend on the workload? 
• How is the wire speed race going between FC and iSCSI? Does anyone actually run iSCSI on 100GbE? When will 128Gb Fibre Channel arrive? 
• Can any server or storage array actually support more than 32Gb/s or 40Gb/s speeds?
• Do Linux, Windows, or hypervisors have a preference? 
• Is one really easier to install and manage or are they just different?
• How does the new NVMe over Fabrics protocol affect this debate? 

Join SNIA experts as they compare FC vs. iSCSI and argue in an energetic yet friendly way about their differences and merits of each.

Register now for this live event on January 31st.

[dejian007]

HI Walter

Thanks for the reply. Well currently the SAN infrastructure is connected to a netgear switch and is running ISCSI. What I need to do is to move everything off the Netgear and move to 5K and FEX. Initially I plan to use just ISCSI and then maybe in future migrate to Fibre Channel.

I am not sure if the servers have HBA or CNA to move to Fibre Channel. But since I have no experience with storage at all, I am not sure how to run ISCSI and separate it from the data network?

Thanks

Gordon

[Walter Dey · Accepted solution]

iSCSI is simply TCP/IP over Ethernet ! very simple from the network point of view.

It's getting tricky for the host configuration, e.g. multipathing, which is different from classical FC, or FCoE.