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7 Best Practices for Deploying a Mixed 1Gb/10Gb Ethernet SAN using Dell Storage PS Series Arrays | BP1008
Mixed speed PS Series SAN
Referring to Figure 3, there are some important design considerations to be aware of:
 Each of the 1Gb switches is configured with one dual-port 10Gb uplink module and one stacking
module. The stacking module is used to create a single logical switching fabric out of the two 1Gb
switches. The 10Gb uplink modules are used for creating a single 40Gb LAG (all four ports from the
stack) uplinks to the 10Gb stacked switches.
 The 40Gb LAG uplink between the 1Gb and 10Gb switches are cross-connected so that each 10Gb
switch physically connects to both switches in the 1Gb stack for redundancy.
 Each of the 10Gb switches is configured with a stacking module. The stacking module is used to
create a single logical switching fabric out of the two 10Gb switches.
You may be wondering, why not just attach my 10Gb arrays directly to the 10Gb uplink ports on the Dell
Networking N3000 Series switches? While this looks like a good idea for small installations, because of
performance and reliability considerations, we recommend NOT using this connection strategy. One of the
primary reasons for this is that the buffering available on the 10Gb uplink ports on 1Gb switches were never
designed to have utilization devices (host or storage devices) connecting to these ports.