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Multi-vendor environments have been the norm for decades to accelerate innovation, lower costs, and enable customers to?optimize?infrastructure with?best-of-breed?technologies.

But are there?still?hidden?advantages?going with a vertically integrated vendor?

³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ, Dell and Cisco set out to answer this question in storage networking by submitting two SAN solutions to Tolly, a technical benchmarking service: the?Dell PowerStore 32G Enterprise Storage Solution¹?and the?Dell PowerMax 64G Enterprise Storage Solution.²?The solutions combine ³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ??QLogic??32G and 64G?Fibre?Channel HBAs with Dell PowerEdge 17G servers,?Connectrix?MDS Switches and Directors, as well as?PowerStore?and?PowerMax?storage.

Tolly found the systems delivered on seamless interoperability. More importantly, the technologies from the individual vendors such as highlighting the SAN congestion mitigation and comprehensive security.??

Better together, in other words,?is?better. The set-up and the test results are below.??

FPINs and Virtual Lanes Offer?Interoperability?and Compatibility

The solutions?offer?comprehensive 32/64G?Fibre?Channel (FC) interoperability,?making the solution easy?to adopt for?storage?networking applications?in the data center.

The features are?also plug-and-play?compatible?for?seamless experience.?The ³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ?Fabric Performance Impact Notification?frames?(FPINs)?and Virtual Lanes?(VLs)?for SAN endpoint connections,?for example, pair well with?Connectrix?MDS¡¯?Dynamic Ingress Rate Limiting (DIRL)?inside the?FC?storage area network (SAN). ³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ HBAs uniquely offer these VLs, which are compatible with all FC switches, including?solution partner Cisco.?

Resilience

The?two?FC HBA?solutions?from ³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ?deliver automated resilience, featuring rapid failover and recovery capabilities.

Robust and?reliable,?they ensure high availability and performance for essential workloads. The solution encapsulates HBA port and adapter resilience, as well as?support?for?redundant FC fabrics.

Autonomous?Congestion Mitigation?

When IT departments upgrade to lightning-fast storage, the slower servers in modern data centers may?attempt?to transfer more data than they?can?handle.?That¡¯s?why one of the key features of the solutions is?congestion mitigation, even in a finely tuned FC SAN.

Imagine data transmission as cars on the highway; there are fast lanes and slow lanes so cars can?optimize their speed?depending on their urgency.?³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ Virtual Lane Technology?works in?a similar way:?when there is congestion, the?FC HBA?autonomously switches the session associated with the slow drain congestion to?a slow virtual lane.?Essentially, the?solution creates?a multi-lane highway out of a single-lane country road, so the slow traffic goes in the slow lane,?which avoids impeding ¡°normal¡± or ¡°fast¡± traffic?that is a higher-priority.?This self-healing system?with?bandwidth?throttling and VL switching?efficiently?optimizes?storage networking?traffic.

Image from Tolly reports demonstrating ³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ QLogic Virtual Lane technology using the highway analogy.

Security

With high volumes of?data flowing in these enterprise systems,?security is another priority.?The storage solution?by?³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ, Dell and Cisco?ensures?security?in?all FC SAN elements within the data center,?including HBAs.

³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ?QLogic HBAs?support CNSA-strength (Commercial National Security Algorithm) silicon?"root of trust" for secure host boot?as well as?comprehensive?Encrypted Data in Flight (EDIF),?protecting FC SAN connections between servers and storage.?The hyper-speed?encryption?(³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ?StorCryption)?also?operates?at wire speed?and?effortlessly?integrates?with Cisco fabric security features.

Total Results

³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ,?Dell?and Cisco are providing a?better together?valuable storage networking solution, as verified by Tolly, that?enables?¡°better together¡±?hardware for end users while?supplying?defense-in-depth?security.?This?lowers the barrier to entry, thereby increasing the adoption rate of these?Fibre?Channel solutions.?

Solution Video Overview

In?a webinar?hosted by Tolly Enterprises, ³Ô¹ÏºÚÁÏ?had a chance to explain how?its components in the?multi-vendor solution function.