By Chandan 19th Dec 2011

FC Theory SAN Administration & Labs SAN Troubleshooting & Labs, Test

Fiber Channel Theory

It is a dedicated storage network, designed specifically to connect storage, backup devices, and servers General-purpose networks, such as LANs and WANs, carry heavy user communications traffic involving printers, email, and so forth. A SAN is the back-end network that carries storage traffic, which provides a clear separation of storage devices from processing and presentation activities and enables the front-end LAN to carry normal TCP/IP traffic SANs have become almost synonymous with Fibre Channel. However, Fibre Channel is not a required component, because almost any networking or serial SCSI technology can be used to create a SAN In addition, the Fibre Channel protocol is designed to carry not just SCSI traffic, but also TCP/IP traffic and other protocols

Customized physical storage topologies SANs enable you to establish different physical storage topologies, which can be customized for the existing business need, and can readily accommodate change Reduced costs and easier management of capital assets

SAN connectivity enables storage for many servers to be consolidated on a small number of shared storage devices, reducing costs and easing management of capital assets Cost Effective Expansion A SAN can be cost-effectively expanded to support more users, more raw storage, more storage devices, more parallel data paths, and more widely distributed user populations

Any-to-any connectivity Any server can potentially talk to any storage device, and communication among storage and SAN devices (switches, hubs, routers, bridges) is enabled Open systems SANs support multiple operating systems and servers Centralized management Using the fast performance, high reliability, and long distance capabilities of fiber optics, SANs make it practical to locate the storage systems away from the servers. This opens the door to storage clustering, data sharing and disaster planning applications

High-speed backup The amount of data being stored, the speed of access to that data, and the amount of time that data is kept online are all growing exponentially. Backup and recovery operations are coming under increasing pressure from collapsing backup windows and growing storage requirements

Because SANs remove backup and recovery traffic from the LAN, congestion is reduced and backup windows are improved. System performance is dramatically increased because data and communications traffic no longer compete for the limited bandwidth on a standard LAN

Serverless Backup SANs also can be configured for serverless (active fabric) backup. Serverless backups use the Network Data Management Protocol (NDMP), the standard for backing up network-attached storage, and SCSI Extended Copy to move the data directly from disk to tape. This enables continuous, uninterrupted access to data and applications during the backup and restore processes This technology also eliminates the read/write processes through the application and backup hosts, resulting in up to 97% less processing power. By removing the LAN, CPU and I/O resources from the data path, network bottlenecks are eliminated and high application performance is maintained Serverless backup is ideal for large databases or file servers for which there is no backup window

Why Fibre Channel? Fibre Channel layers and their components & Functionality

A standard: AN ANSI standard providing flexible serial data transport at long distances for Storage Area and System Area Networks - ratified as ANSI standard in 1994. Now an ISO/IEC Standard High performance and speed: Hardware based transport mechanism for high performance; 1, 2, 4, 10 Gb/s speeds Low latency: Less than 2 micro second latency input port to output port of FC switch Long distance: Up to 10KM distance (longer with extenders), can be extended non-natively over ATMs up to 3000 km Robust data integrity: Uses IBMs 8B/10B encoding scheme for robust integrity plus FC has a bit error rate (BER) of 10-12 - about 1 bit error every trillion bits.

Large connectivity: Per the standard, Fibre Channel allows a theoretical 16M devices to be connected to one Fabric Support for multiple physical media types - Copper, Optical Fibre (multimode and Single mode) and Mixed media Support for multiple protocols - SCSI, IP, VIA, FICON, etc. and mixed protocols Support for multiple topologies - Point-to-Point, Switched, Loop and mixed topologies Heterogeneous interconnect scheme for computing and peripheral devices

To prevent a target device from being overwhelmed with frames, Fibre Channel provides several flow control mechanisms based on a system of credits. Each credit represents a device's ability to accept an additional frame. If the recipient issues no credits to the sender, no frames can be sent. Pacing frame transport on the basis of credits prevents loss of frames and reduces the frequency of entire sequences being retransmitted across the link There are two Types of Flow control Mechanisms 1. End-to-end flow control 2. Buffer-to-buffer credit (BB_Credit)

Transmission credit is initially established when two communicating nodes log in and exchange communication parameters. End-to-end flow control (EE_Credit) is used by Class 1 and Class 2 service between two end nodes and is monitored by the nodes themselves. An intervening switch does not participate in EE_Credit. After an initial credit level is granted, credits are replenished by acknowledgments issued by the receiver to the sender. The sender decrements the EE_Credit by 1 for each frame issued and increments only when an ACK is received.

Buffer-to-buffer credit (BB_Credit) is used by Class 2 and Class 3 service and relies on the receiver-ready (R_RDY) ordered set to replenish credits. An end node attached to a switch will establish its BB_Credit during login to the fabric. A communicating partner on the far side of the switch will establish its own (and possibly different) BB_Credit to the switch during login. BB_Credit thus has no end-toend component. The sender decrements the BB_Credit by 1 for each frame sent, and increments BB_Credit by 1 for each R_RDY received. The initial value of the BB_Credit must be nonzero.

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Fibre Channel Topologies FC Addressing

Switch Initialization Device initialization What happens when a Fabric device connects to a Fabric?