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 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 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.