Fibre Channel over Gigabit WAN Ethernet without FCIP possible?

Hi group, I have a general understanding question. We have a SAN and we need to extend it to a second location via a 1GB WAN-Ethernet circuit. All my research brought back to use the FCIP feature of the McData or MDS900 switches and then route the traffic via IP. I dont like this idea beacause of all the issues with overhead and buffer tweaking that need occur to proper run that architecture.

Isnt it possible to kind of bridge the FC traffic over the ethernet without using IP? The speed of the FC and the ethernet WAN is the same.

I found also there is a FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) specs in the works, but this will take some more time to be established.

Am I thinking in the wrong direction, or are there maybe devices on the market which allows me to do what I have described?

Dark fibre is no option in that place, otherwise we would have used that for FC transport.

Thanks, Greetings, Jo

Reply to
Sparket
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It is technically possible but the logistics are not that simple. FCIP runs over TCP which takes care of loss/error recovery within the IP network. If you ran FC directly over Ethernet it would most likely be lossy. There is also no standard for establishing FC communication directly over Ethernet

- think end node discovery and other fabric services.

I don't think there are any devices that you can buy today that run FC directly over Ethernet.

Anoop

Reply to
anoop

Thanks Anoop, for the clarification! Greets, Jo

Reply to
Sparket

Hi Jo,

Why won't you use FC directly over SDH in the WAN, through the GFP adaptation which is part of SDH.

For 1 Gbit/s you have VC-4-7v. How far is the storage location from the source?

Regards, Michelot

Reply to
Michelot

if you have a metro Gigabit link it may support F/channel directly.

A lot of metro DWDM can be set to support either - eg the Adva FSP2000s which are used by various carriers for this in the UK.

same may be true for some SDH kit.

Reply to
stephen

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