[Info-vax] fibrechannel

[vaxinf at chemie.uni-konstanz.de]

Am Samstag, 24. März 2012 12:12:21 UTC+1 schrieb Phillip Helbig---undress to reply:
> In article <4f6d7c50$0$294$14726298 at news.sunsite.dk>, Roy Omond
> <roy at omond.net> writes: 
> 
> > On 23/03/2012 19:35, Phillip Helbig---undress to reply wrote:
> > > Having recently obtained some new (for me) hardware, I'm wondering if it
> > > is worth the trouble (now, that means mainly the question whether it can
> > > be done quickly) to have connections other than ethernet (which
> > > currently carries everything) among the machines.  Is it simply a matter
> > > of sticking in a card and having it just work out of the box or does one
> > > have a lot of configuration to do?
> > 
> > I hope you realise that SCS (cluster communications) does not use fibre
> > channel as a medium ...
> 
> That's why I'm asking.  Up until now, I have never used anything but 
> ethernet (though various kinds) for any sort of cluster communication.  
> The questions are: what is possible and what makes sense.

A Fibre channel solution is a great improvement for a cluster.

It is possible that every node has its own path to the clustered files. This improves obviously the uptime of a service.

The overhead of the I/O is much smaller that for Ethernet because fibre channel is been designed for disk I/O.

Additionally contains the fibre channel controller a read/write-Cache just like the Smart Array PCI-X controllers that improves the I/O rate significantly.

So my advice is: select fibre channel if you have the chance to get the hardware.

Eberhard