McDATA Sphereon 4300 Specifications download pdf (Page 210)

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McDATA Products in a SAN Environment - Planning Manual

Physical Planning Considerations

• Existing cable restrictions - The enterprise may contain only one

type of fiber-optic cable (multimode or singlemode), and the

customer may be required to use the existing cables. Customers

may also be required to use existing copper cables for some

arbitrated loop devices.

Extended-Distance

Ports

Through longwave laser transceivers and repeaters or wavelength

division multiplexing (WDM) equipment, directors and fabric

switches support Fibre Channel data transmission distances of over

100 km. The extended distance feature is enabled on a port-by-port

basis by using entries in the RX BB Credit column for a specified port

at the Element Manager application’s Configure Ports dialog box. This

feature provides extended distance support using Fibre Channel

protocol. Refer to Distance Extension Through BB_Credit for additional

information.

When a director or fabric switch port is configured to support

extended link distances, the attached device (or attached fabric

element) must also support extended distance operation and be

configured to use a higher BB_Credit value to maintain link

efficiency. If the extended distance feature is enabled for a port that is

not installed or does not support extended distance operation, the

configuration for the feature is ignored.

High-Availability

Considerations

To provide high device availability, critical servers, storage devices,

or applications should be connected to more than one fabric element

(director or switch) or to more than one fabric. To determine if

dual-connection capability exists for a device, refer to the associated

device documentation. To provide high fabric availability, consider

the use of multiple fabric elements (directors and switches), multiple

ISLs, or redundant fabrics. Refer to Fabric Availability for information.

Plan to maintain unused (spare) director and switch ports if port

connections must be quickly moved and re-established after a failure.

If an individual port or an entire port card fails, optical transceivers

or port cards can be removed and replaced, spare port connections

identified (through the Element Manager application), and fiber-optic

cables rerouted and reconnected while the director or switch is

operational.

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McDATA Sphereon 4300 Specifications Page 210