ONTAP Hardware

Managing fan-in/fan-out ratio

tyrone_owen_1
10,866 Views

Can anyone give me some tips on how I manage fibre channel fan-in and fan-out ratios please?

Say I have a 100 hosts, each host has two initiator 8Gbps ports connected to a clustered storage array with 8 x 8Gbps FC target ports (total of 16 ports in the cluster) using two switch fabrics for resilience (A and B fabrics). How would I balance the load across each of the target ports? Would I zone so that there is 1 initiator port and 16 target ports, then use MPIO to ensure the balance across portd? Would I just use a sub-set of the target ports? If the latter, how do you ensure you have balanced the hosts across the target ports - do you keep a spreadsheet or something a bit more sophisticated?

Any value you can add outside these questions would be appreciated.

Thanks

12 REPLIES 12
Public