Information Guide

2 © 2013 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information.
“In the end, Cisco enables
me to do more than just
deliver Multihop FCoE…
Having a Cisco Unified
Fabric means an integrated
model that supports FCoE
from the UCS Blade
Servers through the Nexus
Series Switches all the
way to NetApp storage
controllers.”
— Chris Travis
System Architect and
Administrator, Engineering
Shared Infrastructure
Services (ESIS)
NetApp
For Travis’ team in RTP, supporting NetApp storage controllers in this testbed meant
providing Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) functionality, as well as Fibre Channel
(FC) and Ethernet connectivity between Cisco UCS C-series rack-mounted servers
and storage controllers. “We were used to provisioning FCoE and FC, but now we
needed to provide both,” says Travis. “The team making this request provides storage
controllers to other teams, so the entire engineering group needed this functionality,
and we had to deliver it fast.”
Based on his experience with Cisco, Travis knew that the functionality he needed was
already built in to the Cisco switches deployed at NetApp. Turning it on would be easy,
inexpensive, and fast.
Solution
The NetApp engineering team relies on a VMware vSphere-based infrastructure that
can support nearly 100,000 virtual machines running on UCS Cisco B200, B230, and
B200 M3 blade servers and Cisco UCS C200 and C210 rack-mount servers. Cisco
UCS 6100 and 6200 Series Fabric Interconnects provides network connectivity and
management capabilities to all attached blades and chassis.
Cisco Nexus Series Switches connect NetApp storage controllers to physical machines,
including the UCS B and C-series Servers, using cut-through architecture that supports
line-rate 10 Gigabit Ethernet, helps enable consolidation of LAN, SAN, and cluster
environments over a lossless Ethernet fabric, and connects FCoE to native FC. The shared-
test infrastructure uses Nexus 7000 Series Switches for core and distribution switching and
Cisco Nexus 5000 Series Switches and Cisco Nexus 2000 Series Fabric Extenders in the
access layer; it also connects UCS 6100 Series Fabric Interconnects to the Nexus 5000
switches with the UCS B-series Blade Servers. Management and automation tools include
Cisco UCS Manager with service profiles for rapid server deployment and VMware vCenter
with NetApp Virtual Storage Console for integrated storage management.
To accelerate provisioning services in the FCoE and FC environment, Travis needed
to design a network that connected the UCS C-Series servers to the clustered Data
ONTAP storage controllers. He already had the Cisco Nexus 5000 and 7000 switches.
At the access layer on both the filer side and the client side, Travis put a pair of Nexus
5000 switches, and connected them with both FC and FCoE. Different virtual device
contexts on his distribution Nexus 7000 switches provided both an Ethernet connection
and FCoE on the same switch.
The result is a Fabric A and a Fabric B for FCoE. Starting from a UCS server the FCoE
connects with filers, first going through a pair of Nexus 5000 switches, then a distribution
pair of Nexus 7000 switches, then a core pair of Nexus 7000 switches, then to another
distribution pair of Nexus 7000 switches, then to another pair of access Nexus 5000
switches and finally to the filers.
“With multi-hop FCoE, I can connect separate parts of a building that I typically would
not have been able to connect. But now, we have FCoE everywhere. Engineers don’t
even have to ask, because FCoE is already turned on.”