User`s manual

Preliminary
Introduction
SANbox-8 Fibre Channel Switch
Installer’s/User’s Manual 59008-03 Rev. A Multi-Chassis Fabrics 5-9
Choosing a Topology
The topology you choose depends on the following major fabric requirements:
• The size of the fabric (number of user ports required),
• The amount of latency the users can tolerate (number of chassis hops and
interconnection media delay between the source port and the destination
port),
• The bandwidth between chassis (the number of T_Port paths between inter-
connected chassis),
• The physical distances required between users in a “campus” distributed
fabric verses a centrally located fabric.
• MKII compatibility. SANbox switch fabrics support MKII switches as IO/T
chassis in mesh and Multistage topologies.
These topics are discussed for each topology later in this section.
NOTE:
In order to set up a multi-chassis fabric you are required to select a topology, cable
the chassis together, and configure each chassis.
Configuration consists of assigning a stage type to a chassis which tells it which
function it is to perform (IO/T or CC). In the case of a Cascade or Mesh topology,
all chassis are the default stage type (IO/T). A Multistage switch consists of IO/T
and CC chassis. For addressing purposes, you must also assign a Chassis Number
to each chassis.
Refer to “Cascade Topology” on page 5-11, “Mesh Topology” on page 5-15, and
“Multistage Topology” on page 5-18 for information about choosing a fabric
topology. After choosing the fabric topology, refer to “Cabling” on page 5-23 and
“Chassis Configuration” on page 5-24 for the remaining instructions.