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I will be ordering a c7000 server enclosure by HP and adding some BL460c G7 servers. This will be for a completely virtual environment. The G7's have the FlexFabric adapters built in and a pair of BLC VC FlexFabric 10GB 24port modules will be in the enclosure as well.

What would a good SAN for this setup be?

I would like to use LFF disks as we need quite a bit of storage and SFF disks aren't going to cut it. I am hoping to use FCoE. I have looked at the P4300 G2 series and adding the 10GBit adapter, but any advice other advice will be welcomed.

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I have a couple of environments using exactly that setup, same blades, interconnects etc. and love the flexfabrics but be aware that they're not fully end to end FCoE compatible just yet. That said they're a great setup, the CNA functionality alone is superb and I would recommend sticking to FC over 10Gb iSCSI for the setup you have as I think iSCSI has become something of a dead end with FCoE gaining momentum. How about an EVA 4400? In particular the sub model with the 20 port switch is great value and it can scale out to meet 90% of users growth predictions, not a huge fan of the 1TB 7.2k FATA drives but the 600GB 15k ones are great, they do a 10k version if you don't need the speed. This way you can just string a couple of the flexfabric ports straight to the EVA and you're done. We use ESXi but I believe all these parts are supported by Hyper-V with the latest PSP.

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  • Holy crap, I almost drowned in all those TLAs...
    – Chris K
    Feb 8, 2011 at 23:57
  • FCoE requires "Data Center Ethernet", a new form of Ethernet with better flow control, and an FCoE CNA/HBA. You could theoretically create a 100% FCoE-only HBA but that would be daft, if you make it a CNA you can push non-FC traffic over the same min-spec 10Gb controller. You can do iSCSI over a regular 10Gb NIC but you miss out on the benefits of DCE and FC for storage traffic. I can dig out the name of a great Cisco book on the subject if younlike, just drop me an email reminder.
    – Chopper3
    Feb 8, 2011 at 23:57
  • This comment was in response to a comment by another user that they've since deleted.
    – Chopper3
    Feb 9, 2011 at 0:02
  • @Chopper - yeah sorry I deleted the wrong comment by mistake, I meant to delte my "aaand breath" comment Feb 9, 2011 at 0:10
  • Yeah, I didn't get that... Answering via iPad means less formatting generally.
    – Chopper3
    Feb 9, 2011 at 0:14

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