Release Notes

Building a high-availability SAN
52 Dell PS Series Configuration Guide
4110/6110 vertical port failover
With the PS4110/PS6110 family of controllers, vertical port failover can ensure continuous full bandwidth is
available from the array even if you have a link or switch failure. This is accomplished by combining 10GbE
“eth0” ports in each controller into a single logical port from the point of view of the active controller. In a fully
redundant SAN configuration, you must configure the connection as shown in Figure 17.
In a redundant switch SAN configuration, to optimize the system response in the event you have a vertical
port failover, you must connect either the SFP+ cable or the 10GbaseT cable from each controller to a
different switch in the SAN network. While it is a supported configuration, it is not recommended to connect
both the SFP+ and 10GbaseT ports on each controller at the same time. In this scenario, the SFP+ port will
always be the preferred active port and this preference cannot be changed by the user. This preference is not
guaranteed in future array firmware releases.
The connection paths illustrated in Figure 17 show how to connect the port connection paths between the two
controllers. Also note how IP addresses are assigned to the vertical port pair.