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Changing an existing Fibrechannel infrastructure to a 100GbE ethernet network

There are still Fibrechannel SAN systems in use from Quantum or XSAN from Apple in M & E.
When these become end of life companies start to look at alternatives and start to look at costs.

One of the things one considers then is to make a move to ethernet. Ethernet components are better priced then Fibrechannel components. Also the vast majority of computers are delivered now with on board 10GbE ethernet port or ports.

Often the network infrastructure is already OM3 and or OM4 fiber with duplex LC/SR Fibrechannel transceivers. So for 10 and 25GbE ethernet one only has to replace the FC transceivers with the 10 and or 25GbE transceivers.

But also for 50 or 100GbE it is easy. It turns out that one only has to exchange the FC Transceivers with the QSFP28/SR 100G transceivers to get a 100GbE network. Depending on the fiber OM specification the cable length for 100GbE can be 75 meter for OM3, 100 for OM4 and 150 for OM5.

Once this problem is tackled one can decide what the connections from the computers to the ethernet switch and the connections from this switch to the storage should be. Depending on the DDP solution chosen bandwidth on reading from the DDP to the desktop can be as high as 11GB/s.
When the decision is made to change to Ethernet one can go the high availability or stand alone way.

100G Receiver & DDP

The 100GBase-SR-BIDI Transceiver

AVFS iSCSI Ethernet Speed icon

A/V FS software is also involved and offers unique advantages

More about A/V FS

It is important to note that a system consisting of SSDs and HDs by far is preferable. In that case DDP has SSD performance against a hard disk price point.

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