Nic,
It is difficult to describe, but I'll do my best.
The diagram shows two SMARTcentre cabinets, which in turn are connected to each other, to the LAN, to the various servers (IBM SP/2 Lotus Notes Clusters, 390 Web Servers, Hitachi Skyline, SUN, Amdahl), and to an "Integrated SAN". The Integrated SAN consists of a Tape Library 1, Tape Library 2, and a bunch of IBM DASD (storage) devices. It appears that the Fibre Channel switch is used to connect devices in the Integrated SAN, but it is not clear whether it extends beyond that. Some of the servers may be connected via Fibre Channel too, but at least some of them use ESCON connections. The most interesting thing to me is my own speculation that some sort of connectivity device (between FC and Ethernet) will be needed in a configuration like this. I'm hoping Ancor will be providing this device.
There are two SMARTcentres for fault-tolerance. I believe this is the system that was implemented at IGS headquarters, but I also think it will be rolled out to customers at some point.
Craig |
