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

Figure 10 Continuous Access EVA 6–fabric FCIP router conﬁguration

Figure 11 shows a typical 4-port EVA 8000 conﬁguration of a Continuous Access six-fabric with dedicated

backbone fabrics LSAN replication zones solution. In this conﬁguration, half the EVA controller ports

are connected to each of the dual redundant fabrics for each site.

This conﬁguration, using two dedicated backbone fabrics for Fibre Channel routing trafﬁcbetween

edge fabrics, solves all the issues with a traditional FCIP “implementation” and the scaling limitations

of an integrated backbone fabric solution. Fibre Channel Routing solves the issues associated with the

merger of two physically separate fabrics. Since the backbone fabric is no longer used for local trafﬁc,

the scaling issues in terms of number of d evices and switches in the fabric are mitigated. Also because

the IP network is now part of the backbone fabric and not part of the local or remote fabrics, fabric

disruptions are minimized on these fabrics. This solution allows more than two s ites to be connected to

the dedicated backbone fabrics, and so the same backbone fabric could be used for a primary site to

connect to multiple second ary sites.

This conﬁguration also has the advantage of being able to share more devices than the dedicated

replication fabrics, as the dedicated replication fabrics only have the EVA ports connected to them and

only the storage controller can communicate over these fabrics. This enables a server to connect to

storage resources on both the local and remote fabrics while maintaining the ease of management and

fault isolation that two smaller physically separate fabrics have over one large merged fabric.

Solution setup overview