Re: Emulex 375 vs QLogic 5200

Subject: Re: Emulex 375 vs QLogic 5200

From: Bruce Cheng <email@hidden>

Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2006 12:46:47 -0800

Delivered-to: email@hidden

On Feb 1, 2006, at 10:32 AM, Jean-Loup DUBREUCQ wrote:

Bonjour,

First question on this list ... I'm afraid there will be more !

Quite everything is in the title : with your user's experience,
what is the best choice for FC switches in pure XSan environment.
And is there real, technical arguments ?

Thanks for your help.

Cordialement,

_ JLD _

Spend the extra money, and get the Qlogic. The Emulex is a glorified
hub (Its a swtiching Hub).

A real Fabric switch will offer speed, management, better growth path
and Qlogic has some of the best Engineering support I have ever dealt
with. (in United States).

------------------------------

I agree that the Qlogic is a great switch, but the Emulex switch has it's place in many markets also.

The sweet spot is for SAN that require less then 20 ports but you can use cascade mode to add more switches to it. The protocol is Fibre Channel Loop (FC-AL)but because of the crossbar architecture and in speed architecture, you really get close to line speed for each port. It is a very affordable switch ($4999 for 20 ports (all usable) and $1999 for 12 ports) that deliver good performance if your SAN requirement has the port count that it supports.

More advantage of the Emulex switch is here:

http://emulex.com/apple/index.html

http://emulex.com/products/fcswitch/inspeed.html

Xsan: Configuring Emulex Switches

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=300461

If you need more then 20 ports, you can cascade multiple switches and it is a bit more complicated when you do that. But there is a technote written for this also.

Xsan: Configuring Emulex switches in a Cascade topology

http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302998

Emulex Model 375 User's Guide

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/xserve/EmulexSANStorageModel375.pdf

Emulex Model 355 User's Guide

http://manuals.info.apple.com/en/EmulexSANStorageModel355.pdf

The one thing that you need to be aware of is that it supports a common speed across all ports. It's either 1Gb/s or 2Gb/s but not both at the same time. If you have a requirement of using a Tape library (as an example) that would require a 1Gb/s connection for Robotics, you will have to use a second port on your FC card to have a point to point connection to the Tape Library.

-Bruce

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