NIC Expansion for FAS2554?

[sheneman]

We have  a new use case for our dual-controller FAS 2554  that would ideally require additional 10Gb physical network interfaces.  

I assume the answer is no, but I thought I would ask:  are there network expansion cards to add 2 or 4 new physical ports to an existing dual-controller FAS 2554?

Cheers,

 -Luke

[pedro_rocha · Accepted solution]

Hi Luke,

4 UTA2 ports is all you got per FAS2554 controller. It does not accept expansions, it does not have an expansion slot.

Regards,

Pedro

[SpindleNinja]

Correct in that the answer is no.    But why?    4x10G for a 2554 seems... excessive.  

[paul_stejskal]

10Gb is more than enough because of the size of the platform.

[zeitlins]

Hi could you please explain the use case? and how are the existing ports used?

Stefan

[sheneman]

Thanks.   We're working on an "experimental" pilot project where we are extending 3 distinct campus networks from three different universities together in one shared datacenter.  We are looking at using an existing dual-node NetApp FAS 2554 within that datacenter as a way to provide "seamless" access to common research data.   There are exceptionally paranoid security constraints by all 3 campuses to prevent any network bridging in this configuration by having any common intermediate switches, etc. so we were exploring the possibility of directly connecting all three campus networks to the NetApp without going through an intermediate switch.  This would involve 3 PIFs, 3LIFs on a common SVM.   It would not be an HA configuration.

[paul_stejskal]

Given the low throughput capabilities of the 2554, you could use the Gigabit ports. You also could have indirect traffic and have one LIF on one node and two on the other. Definitely not recommended/best practice, but technically possible.