Fibre Channel Storage

Nexsan plays catchup with flash-cached storage controller

Nexsan has introduced an E5000 NAS storage array family with two tiers of solid state controller storage to boost performance, following in the footsteps of NetApp, with its Flash Cache , and Oracle.

Nexsan's E-Series fits alongside the existing E-Series Fibre Channel and iSCSI block access arrays, and the Assureon archive system. The entry-level E5110 has 8 to 62TB of capacity in 3U or 6U rack enclosures, and can utilise a single 100GB SSD as a controller cache. The more capacious E5310 is a high-availability, 3U NAS head with 9 - 720TB of E-Series block SAS and SATA disk drive storage behind it. There can be up to 15TB of SSD read cache and 8GB of write cache SSD.

There is an optional FASTier feature which, Nexsan says, "utilises multiple SSD technologies that work transparently to boost performance for random I/O workloads including applications that are run on top of virtualised computing environments such as VMware, Xen and Hyper-V."

Nexsan says the SSD caching adds up to a sixfold performance boost compared to, presumably, a non-cached E-Series NAS box.

The E5110 and E5310 are available through Nexsan's network of authorised channel partners, with pricing that starts at $14,974 (manufacturer's suggested retail price).

Directing Fibre Channel storage traffic over Ethernet | Network ...

Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) has a tough act to follow. Fibre Channel storage fabrics accomplish an extraordinary feat, creation common storage arrays homogeneous to direct-attached hoop drives to a many servers accessing them.

When servers entrance information from directly trustworthy disks, a information arrives quick and nothing is mislaid en route. The Fibre Channel fabric replicates these characteristics, with packets of information nearing within constant time durations and no detriment of packets.

The outcome is storage area networks that capacitate a common pool of thousands of hoop drives in many arrays to yield storage for hundreds of mission-critical servers.

By contrast, Ethernet LAN and IP WAN networking are reduction reliable, with variable, or “indeterminate”, smoothness time and packets that can get mislaid and contingency be retransmitted. Neither are excusable substitutes for earthy Fibre Channel.

It is comparatively easy to encode Fibre Channel frames within Ethernet packets; a tough partial is creation an indistinct Ethernet act in a same determinate and loss-free approach as Fibre Channel.

That is being achieved by devising a new form of Ethernet, Data Centre Ethernet (DCE), infrequently also called Converged Enhanced Ethernet, to lift a FCoE traffic.

There has been a accordant bid by Ethernet and Fibre Channel vendors such as Brocade, Cisco, Juniper and others, as good as a Ethernet standards bodies, to rise DCE that can be used for FCoE traffic.

Vendors have also been bustling engineering FCoE functionality into their Ethernet switching, routing and corner entrance devices, so that FCoE trade can span a multi-hop DCE network to storage arrays means of receiving and transmitting FCoE commands and information traffic.

Data Centre Bridging is a categorical Ethernet capability being stereotyped for FCoE . This transforms Ethernet into a loss-free and time-keeping manuscript indispensable by FIbre Channel.

An IEEE 802.1 work organisation is bustling operative adult this standard. An Incits (International Committee for Information Technology Standards) T11 cabinet is building a FCoE custom and a FCoE Initialisation Protocol.

The Internet Engineering Task Force is operative on standards that squash Ethernet to capacitate lower-level protocols do some-more and so facilitate a network infrastructure.

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