Mailing List Archive: Netapp: toasters

Fibre vs. copper cabling for FAS3040

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mcdouga9 at egr

Feb 13, 2008, 11:48 AM

Post #1 of 3 (771 views)
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Fibre vs. copper cabling for FAS3040

We recently received a cluster of FAS3040, and due to some ordering
confusion,
ended up with no copper shelf interconnects but an excess of fibre
cables + SFP modules.
We have 4 DS14MK2 FC shelves and one DS14MK2 AT shelf to attach. I will
probably
obtain the copper shelf interconnects that I am supposed to have, but in
the meantime,
would it work good enough for testing using all optical fibre cables and
no copper?
Is this a supported configuration? Would it be unrecommended and how
strongly?

I'd have to assume it is a more costly situation than using copper
interconnects.
I just haven't had time to contact the right people to get this situated
yet.

Michael.Lambert at netapp

Feb 13, 2008, 1:07 PM

Post #2 of 3 (727 views)
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RE: Fibre vs. copper cabling for FAS3040 [In reply to]

Adam,

This will work fine, I can confirm this is supported for the FC shelves, at a minimum. Not sure about ATA. You are correct in that it is generally a cost issue, especially when loops start to grow large ;).

We have some here in the lab set up this way, and many of our customers have this setup. The only headache is that long FC cables need to be coiled, and it tends to take up more space / make things a bit more cluttered in the cabinet.

Generally, I would recommend moving back to the copper intershelf cables when you can. Easier to manage, overall.

And if not, should you ever have a loop problem (crazy!), please let your NetApp support engineer know about the config ;)

--
Mike Lambert
NetApp Technical Support Engineer
I work Sun - Wed, 1300 US ET - 2359 US ET.

-----Original Message-----
From: Adam McDougall [mailto:mcdouga9 [at] egr]
Sent: Wednesday, February 13, 2008 2:48 PM
To: toasters [at] mathworks
Subject: Fibre vs. copper cabling for FAS3040

We recently received a cluster of FAS3040, and due to some ordering confusion, ended up with no copper shelf interconnects but an excess of fibre cables + SFP modules.
We have 4 DS14MK2 FC shelves and one DS14MK2 AT shelf to attach. I will probably obtain the copper shelf interconnects that I am supposed to have, but in the meantime, would it work good enough for testing using all optical fibre cables and no copper?
Is this a supported configuration? Would it be unrecommended and how strongly?

I'd have to assume it is a more costly situation than using copper interconnects.
I just haven't had time to contact the right people to get this situated yet.

hollandwl at gmail

Feb 13, 2008, 1:27 PM

Post #3 of 3 (729 views)
Permalink

Re: Fibre vs. copper cabling for FAS3040 [In reply to]

I would suspect that it really doesn't matter whether they are copper or
fiber. It is a fibre channel arbitrated loop and the actual
interconnects are SFP's. It's just that normally you use fibre for the
first shelf of each loop and copper for the rest.

On Wed, 2008-02-13 at 14:48 -0500, Adam McDougall wrote:
> We recently received a cluster of FAS3040, and due to some ordering
> confusion,
> ended up with no copper shelf interconnects but an excess of fibre
> cables + SFP modules.
> We have 4 DS14MK2 FC shelves and one DS14MK2 AT shelf to attach. I will
> probably
> obtain the copper shelf interconnects that I am supposed to have, but in
> the meantime,
> would it work good enough for testing using all optical fibre cables and
> no copper?
> Is this a supported configuration? Would it be unrecommended and how
> strongly?
>
> I'd have to assume it is a more costly situation than using copper
> interconnects.
> I just haven't had time to contact the right people to get this situated
> yet.

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