White Papers

Connectivity considerations
11 Dell EMC PowerVault ME4 Series and VMware vSphere | 3922-BP-VM
3.2 SAN-attached storage
ME4 Series arrays support SAN-attached Fibre Channel (8 Gb and 16 Gb) and iSCSI (10 Gb and 1 Gb)
connectivity. A switch-attached solution (or SAN) places a Fibre Channel or Ethernet switch between the
servers and the controller enclosures within the storage system. Using switches, a SAN shares a storage
system among multiple servers reducing the number of storage systems required for a particular environment.
Using switches increases the number of servers that can be connected to the storage system to scale to
greater than four servers, which is the limit for a direct-attached environment.
When designing a SAN, using two switches is recommended. This enables the creation of a redundant
transport fabric between the server and the ME4 Series storage, and allows an individual switch to be taken
out of service for maintenance or due to failure without impacting the availability of access to the storage.
When cabling the ME4 Series controllers in a switched environment, pay close attention to the layout of the
cables in both Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabrics. In Figure 2, controller A (the left-most ME4084 controller)
has ports 0 and 2 connected to the top switch, and ports 1 and 3 are connected to the bottom switch, which is
repeated in a similar fashion with controller B. The servers are configured with each server having
connections to each switch. This cabling ensures that access to storage remains available between an
individual server and the ME4 Series array during switch maintenance.
Connecting two hosts to an ME4084 array using two switches