HP StorageWorks 2/24 FW 07.00.00/HAFM SW 08.06.00 McDATA Products in a SAN Env - Page 33

Director Performance Introduction to McDATA Multi-Protocol Products 1 Directors provide the following general performance features: • High bandwidth - Ports on Intrepid-series directors provide full-duplex serial data transfer at a rate of 1.0625, 2.1250, or 10.2000 gigabits per second (Gbps). • Low communication overhead - Fibre Channel protocol provides efficient use of transmission bandwidth, reduces interlocked handshakes across the communication interface, and efficiently implements low-level error recovery mechanisms. This results in little communication overhead in the protocol and a director bit error rate (BER) less than one bit error per trillion (1012) bits. • High-availability - To ensure an availability of 99.999%, director design provides a redundant configuration of critical components with automatic failure detection and notification. Multiple FRUs (logic cards, power supplies, and cooling fans) provide redundancy in case of failure. If an active FRU fails, the backup FRU takes over operation automatically (failover) to maintain director and Fibre Channel link operation. High availability is also provided through concurrent firmware upgrades and spare or unused Fibre Channel ports. • Low latency - For 1.0625 Gbps frame traffic, the latency is less than 2.5 microseconds between transmission of a frame at a source port to receipt of the frame at the corresponding destination port (with no port contention). For 2.1250 and 10.2000 Gbps frame traffic, the latency is less than 2.0 microseconds. • Local control - Actions taking place at a device N_Port seldom affect operation of other ports, therefore servers need to maintain little or no information about other connected devices in a SAN. • Multiple topology support - Directors support both point-topoint and multiswitch fabric topologies and indirectly support arbitrated loop topology. - Point-to-point topology provides a single direct connection between two device N_Ports. This topology supports bidirectional transmission between source and destination ports. Through dynamic switching, directors configure different point-to-point transmission paths. In all cases, connected N_Ports use 100% of the available bandwidth. Introduction to McDATA Multi-Protocol Products 1-7