Performance Support

Storage: SAN Fabric

Transcript
Our topic for this discussion is Storage Area Network or SAN fabric. The SAN fabric is the actual Fibre Channel networking portion of the SAN. When one or more SAN switches are connected a fabric is created. The Fibre Channel protocol is used to communicate over the SAN. A SAN can also consist of multiple fabrics. n fact even a simple SAN often consists of two fabrics for redundanc!" even if there are onl! two Fibre Channel switches in use. n a SAN there are client or host devices these are SAN attached host servers in most cases. These servers are connected to SAN switches which is what we refer to as SAN fabric. The servers use host bus adapters or #$As to connect the Fibre Channel patch cables directl! to the switches in the fabric. The SAN storage devices are also connected to the SAN in the same wa!" the!%re attached via fibre patch cables from the built in storage processor or S& ports. The!%re connected directl! to the Fibre Channel switches in the same fashion as the SAN attached hosts are. n an enterprise class deplo!ment !ou'd see two or more SAN switches in each of the fabrics. The switches within a given fabric are interconnected and the hosts are connected to each of the two fabrics in order to provide ample redundanc! and protection from an! component failures. As illustrated in the diagram here" !ou can see that the fabric provides protection from component failure as it provides multiple paths from the server to the storage device. An #$A and a server could fail" a fibre patch cable could become disconnected" a switch or even two switches could fail and we could lose a storage processor port from the SAN storage device itself and still have access to the storage from our SAN attached host. That is an overview of Storage Area Network fabric. Thanks for watching.

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