4-2
Data Center High Availability Clusters Design Guide
OL-12518-01
Chapter 4 FCIP over IP/MPLS Core
Typical Customer Requirements
Typical Customer Requirements
Small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) represent about 90 percent of all companies in the United States.
These companies typically employ a few hundred employees and are highly focused on their core
services or products. They usually lack IT expertise and manpower to develop, deploy, and maintain
LAN, WAN, and SAN infrastructures. A typical SMB may have one or two offices in multiple metro
areas with one head office (corporate office) in one of the metro areas. The corporate office is considered
as the home office, where the majority of the business activities occur, and other locations are usually
designated as satellite offices where most of the activities are directed to the home office.
These SMBs use IP connectivity to connect between satellite and home offices. Connectivity varies from
Frame Relay, TI, and fractional Ethernet, depending on the demand and size of the SMB. Currently, these
networks are used to carry data and voice traffic. A similar connectivity is considered for storage, but is
not currently installed because of cost constraints. Most of the data at the home office location may be
consolidated into a local SAN, and the data at the satellite offices can be consolidated into small SAN
islands. This introduces the problem of storage connectivity between SAN islands for disaster recovery
and business continuance. There are several options to interconnect the SAN, but the IP network is the
ideal choice because of its availability at the client site and its comparatively low cost.
Figure 4-1 shows a typical customer SAN extension through an SP network.
Figure 4-1 SAN Extension Through SP Network
In most cases, the SMB customers have connectivity that is less than DS3 speed and, in some cases, may
be up to OC-3 speeds. Therefore, in some cases, compressing the Fibre Channel data before transporting
might become a requirement. In any network, security is key to protect valuable data from being misused
by intruders. FCIP traffic must be secured before transporting it across the SP network.
FC
Fabric
FC
Fabric
132421
Cisco MDS 9216
Multilayer Edge
Switch
FCIP
Corporate HQ
FC
Fabric
FC
Fabric
FC
FC
FC
Bandwidth options:
DS1 – OC3 TDM Facilities
FastE and GigE Facilities
FCIP
Remote Sites
SprintLink
Network
Cisco7206 VXR
with FCIP PA
Cisco7206 VXR
with FCIP PA
