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

Planning Considerations for Fibre Channel Topologies
92 SAN High Availability Planning Guide
Mesh Fabric
There are two types of mesh fabrics: full mesh and modified (or partial) mesh. In a
full-mesh topology, every director or switch is directly connected to all directors
and switches in the fabric. The maximum hop count between fabric-attached
devices is one hop. Figure 38 illustrates a full-mesh fabric topology.
Figure 38: Full mesh fabric
Full-mesh fabrics provide increased resiliency over cascaded or ring fabrics, and
are well suited for applications that require any-to-any connectivity. If a single
ISL fails, traffic is automatically routed through an alternate path.
Mesh fabrics also form effective backbones to which other SAN islands can be
connected. Traffic patterns through the fabric should be evenly distributed, and
overall bandwidth consumption is low.
T
M
T
M
T
M
T
M
Interswitch Link
Fabric Connection