Grass Valley Fibre Channel Switch v.5.8 - Manual (Page 11)

15 July 2006 Fibre Channel Switch Installation Manual 11
Connecting Devices to the Switch
Multi-Switch Fabric
If you need to connect more than sixteen Fibre Channel devices together in your video
network, you must use more than one switch to make your connections. When
increasing the size of your fabric, you should follow some basic rules:
• You should ensure that you have at least two inter-switch connections from each
switch. This provides:
• Redundant paths between switches.
• The ability to balance loads over several connections.
• Increasing the number of inter-switch connections will increase the bandwidth
between the switches, and thus between devices connected to different switches.
Figure 0-3 illustrates a fabric comprising two Fibre Channel switches. Note the two
connections between the switches.
Figure 0-4 shows three switches connected together. Note that each switch is
connected to two other switches. You do not need two connections between each pair
of switches, as the failure of any one connection will still provide an alternate
connection over another route.
Adding more inter-switch connections will increase the redundancy and bandwidth
capability, but it will reduce the total number of devices which you can connect to
each switch.
Figure 0-3. A sample two-switch fabric
0564-4