6.2 HP IBRIX 9000 Storage Network Best Practices Guide (TA768-96069, December 2012)

Table 1 FSN customer integration features
DescriptionFeature
Beyond the single user VIF that is required to support FSN failover, IBRIX supports adding
additional user VIFs to an interface. The customer can use this VIF to associate additional IP
Additional user network
VIFs
address ranges with a FSN. The IP address ranges can then be used to assert control over
the network traffic originating from that interface.
VLAN capabilities provide hardware support for running multiple logical networks over the
same physical networking hardware. IBRIX supports the ability to associate a VLAN tag with
VLAN tagging
a FSN interface. The interface then inserts the tag on outbound packets, and only receives
packets with the correct tag. The tag can be used to assert control over the network traffic
originating from that interface. Only bonding modes 1 and 4 are supported for use with
VLAN Tagging.
These features give the customer high-level control over the routing of IBRIX generated network
traffic within the customer’s infrastructure. Table 2 summarizes some of the customer needs that
can be addressed by these features.
Table 2 FSN customer integration needs
CapabilityCustomer Need
Network traffic can be segregated based on different classifications associated with a specific IP
address or VLAN tag. Once the traffic has been organized, it becomes much easier to move the
routing of the traffic to meet changing customer needs.
Organization
Examples of traffic classifications that are possible with IP address and/or VLAN traffic segregation:
• Client type – The SMB, NFS, HTTP, and FTP clients can be configured to use different interfaces.
• Destination – File Clients can be grouped together based on IP address or VLAN tag.
• Group access – A VLAN or IP address range could be set up for each group classification; clients
could be configured to only use the interfaces available to that group.
VLANs can be used to segregate traffic from the IBRIX platform, making it more difficult for an
intermediary to intercept the traffic.
Security
VLANs and IP address ranges can be used in the customer network to ensure that certain kinds of
traffic are routed in a manner that best utilizes the customer infrastructure.
Bandwidth
utilization
If an additional interface is required to implement a new capability (for example, replication), the
interface could potentially be added as a new VLAN interface without requiring physical changes
to the configuration.
Future expansion
Additional user VIFs
IBRIX supports setting up additional user VIFs on top of an already established FSN bonded interface.
The VIFs take the same form and act in a similar manner as the user VIFs described earlier in the
“FSN failover” section. For redundancy, each additional VIF should be set up with a failover pair
on a different FSN.
Figure 6 shows a possible setup with two user VIFs and associated failover pairs.
FSN customer integration features 19