Life with Qlogic’s 5802V: Part 1

If you follow me on Twitter at all, you’ll know that I’m a big fan of Qlogic.  I appreciate the functional simplicity of what Qlogic designs encompass as well as the “get business done” attitude that they bring to their switches, HBAs, NICs, and CNAs.  Imagine my happiness, then, when I got ahold of one of their latest “edge” fibre channel switches, the SANbox 5802V.  The SANbox 5802V follows the typical edge-switch formula: 20 SFP ports for either 4Gb/s SFPs or 8Gb/s SFP+, 4 stacking ports that default at 10Gb/s Fibre Channel connection and can be upgraded to 20Gb/s FC when additional bandwidth is needed, a serial and IP-based management port setup, and dual redundant power supplies (the 5802V ships with 2 PSUs; the 5800V model ships with only 1).

SANbox 5802V

Specifications

As I listed above, the quick specs on the 5802V switch are:

• 20 ports of SFP/SFP+ FC connectivity for 2, 4, and 8Gb/s FC connectivity (8 standard; licensed in 4 port increments)
• 4 ports of Xpak ISL/Stacking ports that run at 10Gb/s (std) or 20Gb/s (optional)
• Stacking of up to 8 x 5802 switches for an aggregate port count of 160 ports
• Serial, IP, and in-band FC management capabilities
• Dual redundant hot-swap PSUs (5802V only) or single, chassis cold-swap PSU (5800)
• 544 Gbps chassis bandwidth (no port is oversubscribed; stark contrast to Cisco MDS series)
• 1 Rack unit in height

Front Panel Overview

The SANbox 5802V is a relatively understated piece of hardware.  One of the first things you see are the rather sizable stacking ports on the right hand side of the switch.

Rather than impinge upon the total port count for ISLs and potentially running into bandwidth issues, Qlogic chose to dedicate ports for ISL and stacking.  Each of these stacking ports utilizes a propietary Xpak connector (seen below) that allows the 5802V to communicate via 10Gb/s Fibre Channel as an ISL/stacking protocol.  These Xpak connectors ship with each switch (just 1 connector) and using 2 of these connectors nets a channel that is 20Gb/s in total.  Optionally, you can purchase a licensing upgrade that will turn each of these ports into a 20Gb/s pipe.  With only two switches, your ISL could scale from 20Gb/s to 40Gb/s without having to take away ports from your storage or hosts. This allows you to scale your interswitch traffic on demand without additional ISL or Fabric licensing costs.

XPak Connector

Moving over to the left side of the switch, we get to the management ports.  Qlogic provides both a serial connection as well as a gigabit ethernet based management ports along with a series of LED lights noting power on, heartbeat, and maintence button (recessed so that you don’t do something inexplicably stupid).

Management Ports

Finally, we’ve got the front end data ports which feature port status and link activity lights as well.  These can be helpful for determining whether or not links are active (in case you didn’t already know via SNMP traps or array/host reporting) as well as link activity (helpful for determining path management activity).

SANbox 5802v FC Ports

Back Panel Overview

The back panel of the 5802V is rather simple.  Dual hot-swappable power supplies that feature status lights to quickly determine online/offline status.  Again, handy if you’re in the data center for those quick rack surveys that we all do.

Power Supplies

It’s worth noting here that the 5800 features a single, embedded power supply that requires switch servicing if the power supply fails.

Next steps

In additional articles, I’ll be diving into the interface of the 5802V to show you some of the cool features that make this, in my humble opinion, the class-leading departmental/edge fibre channel switch.  Stay tuned, you’re not going to want to miss this!!

For more information on the SANbox 5802V, please visit Qlogic’s website here.  Any comments or feedback on what you want to see, let me know….here’s a teaser image for part 2…

SANBox Gui

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Tagged as: Business, Cisco Systems, EMC, Ethernet, Fibre Channel, Fibre Channel over Ethernet, Host adapter, Infiniband, Network card, Qlogic