HP StorageWorks B-Series Remote Replication Solution Best Practices Guide (5697-6731, June 2007)

Figure 5 Dedicated bac kbone fabric Me ta SAN

Utilizing a Dedicated Ba ckbone as shown in Figure 5 can solve the backbone fabric scaling and FCIP IP

network issues. By implementing a dedicated backbone fabric, no existing production fabric has the

backbone fabric scaling limitations imposed on it, and generally the number of FC switches and devices

on this dedicated fabric are sm aller and within the current lim i tations.

In a ddition to eliminating the scaling restrictions, when FCIP is used as the SAN extension technology, the

IP network is now part of the backbone fabric rather then any of the individual edge fabrics. Each site

has a piece of the backbone fabric and, if the IP network g oes down, the edge fabrics will only see a

Registered State Change Notiﬁcation (RSCN) rather than the fabric transition the edge fabric would see if

the IP network were a part of that edge fabric.

The MP Router por tion of the backbone fabric at each site could also contain c om mon devices s h ared

between multiple edge fabrics at that site. For example, if Site #1 had several edge fabrics and wanted

to share a tape library system, the tape subsystem could be placed on the MP Router that is the interface

tothebackbonefabricforthesite’sedgefabrics.

Figure 6 Dedica ted backbone fabric wit h common devices

Sample topologies and conﬁgurations

The following includes conﬁgu rations that use the HP StorageWorks 400 MP Router and/or the MP

Router blade for implementing a FCIP disaster recovery solution. The conﬁguration concepts from the

previous section are discussed in context with these conﬁgurations.

400 MP Router and MP Router blade fabric architecture

There are four proven SAN extension solutions that can be implemented with various director/switch/router

combinations, depending on the size of the SAN and the availability level required:

• 2–fabric architecture: used for smaller SANs with lower throughput and connectivity levels

• 4–fabric architecture: used for smaller SANs, providing higher availability than the 2–fabric

solution.

• 5–fabric architecture : used when larger scalability is required, and for I/O write-intensive

situations

Solution setup overview