First dive into Storage Networking

When I started this blog last week, I certainly didn’t think my first post would be on the topic of Storage Networking. My background is R&S / SP more than it is storage. I work as a consultant building ISPs in Australia (and occasionally across Asia Pacific).

Some of my customers are End User ISPs, others are Content Providers, so I often get thrown at interesting new projects (sometimes at the whim of engineers on a tech-fetish, sometimes from the buzzword bingo of Sales and Marketing).

Given the industry craze at the moment for “virtualisation” and “cloud computing”, I knew it wouldn’t be long before I had to design a solution based on the Nexus platform and that this would involve more than just Ethernet and IP.

I knew that the Nexus would allow me to just implement a tried and true solution using MST and some port channels. What I hadn’t realised was that a whole new world of networking goodness had been opened up in the Nexus platform running NX-OS. Upon researching the NX-OS platform I learned wonderful terms such as “Lossless Ethernet”, “Virtual Port Channel”, not to mention more information about Storage networking than I had gained working with some VMWare/Virtualisation geeks on several projects.

I’m still investigating best-practices builds for the Nexus platform, but I currently have a project on hand that requires me to learn about FCoE and Virtual Port-Channel implementation.

I promise I will keep you updated with any new tricks I learn.

Resources:

http://jasonnash.wordpress.com/2009/08/10/vpc-virtual-port-channel-and-the-nexus-platform/

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps9670/prod_white_papers_list.html

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