Design considerations for Ethernet switches
Extended network and switch configurations are available upon
consultation with Grass Valley. Guidelines are as follows:
- Port count — The number of client connections, FTP/streaming connections, and other connections determine how many ports are required. As the port count increases, you must use switches with more ports and/or multiple switches. When multiple switches are used, the port count assigned to each VLAN and the ports used for ISLs must be considered.
- Switch/fabric design — On large multiple switch systems, designers with sufficient knowledge have options for the separation of iSCSI or LAN Connect media traffic. For example, you can use one switch/fabric for media traffic, one switch/fabric for control traffic, and one switch/fabric for FTP traffic.
- You can trunk up to ten Cisco ports and four HP/Dell ports together, as necessary for your switch design.
- FTP bandwidth — This is a
consideration if using multiple switches that share the FTP traffic. In this case
you must use sufficient ISLs to provide the bandwidth needed to support your FTP
traffic load between switches. FTP traffic is variable and has potentially higher
bandwidth needs, it is the primary consideration when designing ISLs. When using 1
Gig connections for ISLs, connect and configure as follows, taking your FTP
bandwidth into consideration:
Maximum FTP bandwidth Trunk/ISLs required Less than 100 MB/sec A trunk with three 1 Gb/s ISLs 100 - 300 MB/sec A trunk with five 1 Gb/s ISLs More than 300 MB/sec A trunk with two 10 Gb/s ISLs Note: One Gig ISLs must be an odd number (3 or 5).If a switch's 10 Gig connections are not used for other purposes, such as connection to a K2 Media Server, you can use the 10 Gig connections for ISLs.