Technical information

June 2012 Dell EqualLogic Configuration Guide v13.2 64
Table 30 Non-Stacked, Multiple M1000e Enclosure Direct Connect SAN
Non-Stacked, Multiple M1000e Enclosure Configuration
Advantages Concerns
•
Required for non-stacking M-Series IO
Modules to support direct attached
arrays.
• Array firmware can be updated without
SAN being brought down for
maintenance
•
Spanning tree protocol will block one
link to prevent a loop
• Spanning tree may change if M-series IO
modules are uplinked to other switches
(such as when attempting replication to
remote data center).
• Requires more cables than stacked
solutions
Other Notes
•
Should only use 10GbE links for this strategy to ensure adequate bandwidth between
modules and enclosures.
• Limited scalability due to potentially excessive hop-counts and latency. Recommend no
more than 2-3 enclosures in this design
If large SAN solutions are required, the design just discussed may not be the adequate. While the
stacking interfaces on the M-series IO modules is higher than we could obtain using a link aggregation
group consisting of 1Gb ports, it is still somewhat limited. Also, if you foresee needing more M1000e
enclosures than the two to three enclosure maximum recommended, then a different SAN design
strategy should be considered.