SAN controller 1gbe compatible

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ASKER

yes, its a replacement for a failed SAN, we don't have 10gbe switches or cards in servers

Oh I see. I did the same thing before. Had to team a 1GB connection using the 10GB controller while waiting for our 10GB cards to arrive. Once it did, since it was in a cluster and I wasn't going to lose connectivity, I was able to pop the 10GB cards in and switched to Cat 6a cables and was back in business.

ASKER

so you can aggregate ports on the controller?

It was teamed on my server. each port on the SAN had different IP addresses within the same subnet so once the 10g came in, I was able to create multiple sessions in iSCSI to each IP for load balancing and redundancy

I'm surprised since the owner's manual says REPL and MGT are 1/10Gb but only mentions 10Gb for the data ports.

Are the data ports SFP+ or RJ45?

Gerald Connolly

Leadtheway, Coolie - please guys, the defacto standards are B = Bytes and b=bits

So GB = GigaBytes, and Gb = Gigabits

It's also 10GBASE-T , not 10base t (which looks suspiciously like 10Mbps).

ASKER

well aware of the standards. Anyone in IT knows what is meant.

I hope you chose that answer after testing rather than just hoping it is right.

So you deliberately accepted the wrong answer because Gerald told you off for using wrong capitalization?

ASKER

I selected the right answer, verified by dell support engineer. And actually my abbreviation was fine.. anyone thats worked in IT for more than a week knows gbe is gigabit ethernet. Gerald was referring to him using 10base T, I knew what he meant in context to my question. Thus, the correct answer

Good luck but the sales FAQ says "no 1Gb iSCSI or 10GBaseT".

If you spoke with a Dell support Engineer and they confirmed it can work, I would listen to that person.

However, here's a PDF for your specific model:

ftp://customer:Y3V2s-uH@ftp.compellent.com/DOCUMENTS/690-052-001.pdf

On page 132, their recommended iSCSI settings for Full Duplex says:

Use auto-negotiate for all interfaces that negotiate at full-duplex and at the maximum speed of the
connected port (1GbE or 10GbE).

• If a switch cannot correctly auto-negotiate at full-duplex or at the maximum speed of the
connection, it should be hard set at full-duplex and at the maximum speed of the connected port
(1GbE or 10GbE).

Either way, hope everything works out for you and thanks for understanding the terminology that I wrote incorrectly (lol)

Page 132 is part of the client (i.e. server) settings, not the SAN settings. Of course client NICs or HBAs can run at 1Gb because the switch does store/forward between 10Gb and 1Gb devices.

It also says the 4020 can use the MGMT and REPL ports (at 1Gb) for iSCSI but does not say that for the 4020i . Because it is a combined 4020 / 4020i manual it also says front end switch connectivity can be 1 / 10Gb but that's probably by using the 4020 mgmt and repl ports.

You might get away with 1Gb SFPs in the 10Gb ports but Compellent is very fussy about hardware compatibility. Maintaining them is not an easy or cheap task because of that.

Coolie, When you say above that you "did this" you refer to putting 10Gb cards in something, was that a SC2040i or some other bit of kit?

Okay, I'll explain the environment as best as I can, please forgive any wrong terminology.

The environment that I'm speaking of was/is setup like this:

The Cisco Catalyst switches are 10GBe switches with SFP+ 10GBe transceivers. The 10GBe ports on the SAN runs directly to the switches over Cat6a cables.

On the server end, on each host, I have 2 10GBe ports connected to the 10GBe switches.

However, before setting that environment up, the CAT6a cables weren't ordered and I had to get it up and running.

So I connected CAT5e cables up to the 10GBe ports on the SAN and ran it to the 1GBe ports on the switch.

I connected up CAT5e cables up to the server and connected them to the 1GBe ports on the switch and teamed them. I used MCS in iSCSI to connect to the different targets on the iSCSI SAN targets in the session.

When the cables came in, one at a time, I removed the CAT5e cables from the SAN port, plugged the CAT6a cables in the port, and ran it directly to the SFP+ 10GBe transceivers and from there connected it to the 10GBe ports on the server. I removed the 1GBe port from the team and added the 10GBe port into the team.

I did this until all 1GBe ports was replaced with 10GBe connections.

And that was a Compellent SC4020i ?

I guess it is right after all. "If its a 10base t controller and you plug a 1GBe cable in, it will perform at 1GBe." is correct in that it is not a [10GBase-T] controller so the rest of the sentence could be anything,

Gerald Connolly

using the correct nomenclature can be important - The use of the wrong units is how the Mars Climate Orbiter (1999) was lost because one team used Imperial units and the other Metric Units and nobody noticed until it was lost!

Lots of problems caused by the use of numeric only dates - The US uses month, day, year, while the majority of the rest of the world use day, month, year - how long is it going to be before people think 9/11/2001 happened in November?

And the real acronym for Gigabit Ethernet is "GbE"

Just for you information - i have been in IT for a tad longer than most people and i am a pedant! :-)

You have to be pedantic; if you weren't you may end up paying thousands of dollars for something that does not do what you asked for. Drop the i off the end of SC4020i for example and you end up with something that can do 16Gb FC and 1Gb iSCSI rather than something that can only do 10Gb iSCSI.

You also have to double check any advice you have been given since you can accept something as fact from someone who boasts they have done that when in actuality they have only done something vaguely similar with a totally different bit of kit.