FW 05.01.00 and SW 07.01.00 HP StorageWorks SAN High Availability Planning Guide (AA-RS2DC-TE, June 2003)

15SAN High Availability Planning Guide
1
Introduction to HP Fibre
Channel Products
This chapter introduces Hewlett-Packard (HP) Fibre Channel switching products
that allow deployment and implementation of a storage area network (SAN)
topology in a Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) or IBM fiber connection (FICON)
environments. HP offers several switch alternatives to build a robust and scalable
SAN infrastructure that meets the customer’s data center requirements.
Product Overview
HP provides three broad classes of Fibre Channel switching products, as follows:
■ Directors — A director is a high port count, high-bandwidth switch designed
with fully redundant, hot-swappable field replaceable units (FRUs) that
provide an availability of 99.999% (approximately five minutes of down time
per year). HP offers the 64-port StorageWorks Director 2/64 and 140-port
StorageWorks Director 2/140.
The director implements Fibre Channel technology that provides
high-performance scalable bandwidth at 2 gigabits per second (Gbps), highly
available operation, redundant switched data paths, long transmission
distances (up to 50 kilometers at 2 Gbps or 100 kilometers at 1 Gbps), and
high device population. Refer to “Directors” on page 18 for detailed
information.
■ Edge switches — An edge switch is a low to medium port count,
high-bandwidth switch designed with redundant power supplies and cooling
fans that provide an availability of 99.9% (approximately 8.8 hours of down
time per year). HP offers the 16-port StorageWorks Edge Switch 2/16, the
24-port StorageWorks Edge Switch 2/24, and the 32-port StorageWorks Edge
Switch 2/32 that operate at 2.125 Gbps.
These switches implement the same high-performance Fibre Channel
technology as the director, but with less redundancy, availability, and expense.
Refer to “Edge Switches” on page 25 for detailed information.