HP Surestore 64 FW 05.01.00 and SW 07.01.00 HP StorageWorks SAN High Availabil - Page 19

Introduction to HP Fibre Channel Products Director Performance Directors provide the following general performance features: ■ High bandwidth - Each port provides full-duplex serial data transfer at a rate of 2.125 Gbps. ■ High availability - To ensure an availability of 99.999%, director design provides a redundant configuration of critical components with automatic failure detection and notification. Pairs of critical FRUs (logic cards, power supplies, and cooling fans) provide redundancy in case of failure. When 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 - 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). ■ 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. ■ 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. SAN High Availability Planning Guide 19