Storage Networking

Storage Networking

Chi's Storage Networking solutions utilize proven, best-of-breed components that extend your storage network - not your budget. Chi's fully trained and certified system engineers will work with your organization to configure cost-effective solutions that will exceed your expectations with a variety of solutions.

A Fibre Channel Switch is a network switch compatible with the Fibre Channel (FC) protocol. It allows the creation of a Fibre Channel fabric, that is currently the core component of most storage area networks. The fabric is a network of Fibre Channel devices which allows many-to-many communication, device name lookup, security, and redundancy. FC switches implement zoning, a mechanism that disables unwanted traffic between certain fabric nodes.

Fibre Channel Switches may be deployed one at a time or in larger multi-switch configurations. SAN administrators typically add new switches as their server and storage needs grow, connecting switches together via fiber optic cable using the standard device ports. Some switch vendors now offer dedicated high-speed stacking ports to handle inter-switch connection, similar to existing stackable Ethernet switches.

Infiniband Switches use input/output architecture designed for high-end computer clusters and storage networks, introduced in 1999. Using switched, point-to-point channels similar to mainframes and also similar to PCI Express (switched version of PCI), InfiniBand is designed as a true fabric architecture that can extend connections via external networks. Speed is 2.5 Gbps in each direction, and channels can be bonded to double and quadruple the data path to 5 and 10 Gbps.

Fibre Channel Adapters are available for all major open systems, computer architectures, and buses, including PCI and SBus (obsolete today). Each adapter has a unique World Wide Name (WWN), which is similar to an Ethernet MAC address in that it uses an OUI assigned by the IEEE. However, WWNs are longer (8 bytes). There are two types of WWNs on an adapter; a node WWN, which is shared by all ports on a host bus adapter, and a port WWN, which is unique to each port. There are adapter models from different speed: 2Gbit/s, 4Gbit/s and 8Gbit/s.

InfiniBand Adapters provide a point-to-point bidirectional serial link intended for the connection of processors with high speed peripherals such as disks. It supports several signalling rates and, as with PCI Express, links can be bonded together for additional bandwidth.

iSCSI Adapters are a product that implements a hardware initiator. A typical adapter is packaged as a combination of a Gigabit (or 10 Gigabit) Ethernet NIC, some kind of TCP/IP offload technology (TOE) and a SCSI bus adapter, which is how it appears to the operating system. An iSCSI adapter can include PCI option ROM to allow booting from an iSCSI target.

A Storage Router is a computer whose software and hardware are usually tailored to the tasks of routing and forwarding information. Routers generally contain a specialized operating system, RAM, NVRAM, flash memory, and one or more processors.

A Firewall is a dedicated appliance, or software running on another computer, which inspects network traffic passing through it, and denies or permits passage based on a set of rules. A firewall's basic task is to regulate some of the flow of traffic between computer networks of different trust levels. Typical examples are the Internet which is a zone with no trust and an internal network which is a zone of higher trust. A zone with an intermediate trust level, situated between the Internet and a trusted internal network, is often referred to as a "perimeter network" or Demilitarized zone (DMZ).