Connectivity with mirrorview

When you say you have a 100Mb link, does that mean this is a managed link, like 100Mb ethernet ?

If it's ethernet you need some sort of conversion from FC to ethernet based communication. FCIP comes to mind, but iSCSI as well.

If your Clariions both have iSCSI ports, you can start using MV over iSCSI. This is the cheapest way. Simply plug in your iSCSI port in the LAN (I'd use a dedicated VLAN for this).

In order to be able to use FCIP you need a device on both sides of the link that tunnels FC in IP packets. Cisco 9222i, Cisco 9216i, Brocade 7500, QLogic SANbox all do this. If you already have a device like this onsite, you could investigate if you can start using it for remote replication. Some devices I mentioned if not all also do data compression, so this could speed up the replication process significantly which is probably a good thing since you only have a 100Mb link.

Another possibility is the use of xWDM. If the fiber is controlled by you, you could reserve a unique color for FC traffic and simply plug in that color SFP in your SAN switches and start a fabric merge between both sites. From there it's just as if you have 2 Clariions sitting next to eachother. A remark: you'd probably want to use a transit VSAN between the 2 sites, so you may want to consider having 2 Layer 3 SAN switches (one on each site).

Remember that when using MV synchronous, the host will have to wait for each write to reach the 2nd Clariion's cache and over a 100Mb link this could add some nasy latency, so you might want to consider MV/A, SANCopy/inc or a data compression method in the more expensive devices

You will need MirrorView on each Clariion in either case.

RRR,

why would you need a transit VSAN if you are merging two fabrics ? I thought you only need transit VSAN if you are configuring IVR between two or more non-adjacent switches ?

gotcha ..i thought that was some other use for Transit VSANs that i need to know about. Thank you

Yes ! You need routing, so IVR... Inter VSAN Routing... FC (could be FCIP as well) will have to go from your source VSAN accross the transit VSAN to the target VSAN.

makes sense, so Transit VSANs are only used with IVR ?