On 11/18/2010 10:53 AM, Yves Dorfsman wrote: > > I need a reality check here, and would really appreciate feed back from people > experience in managing IB. Thanks. > We do it how you proposed, but we have a DDR vs QDR which is pre some of the cool inventions in Voltaire's GridStack UFM architecture. It is indeed pretty cool stuff including tools that let you see utilization by application and really drill down into things.
On the other hand, if you don't really want to spend the extra money or invest the extra time in having a host-based fabric manager with all the bells and whistles, your first plan is just fine. It will *just work*. One thing to note, is that the different majors do things slightly differently. Mellanox based switches have some of the features (but not all) of the unified fabric manager (UFM) built into the firmware of their switch, including auto-matic migrations, which is the one thing that we really want. But Voltaire's feature set really is a value add, for a price. They get all of their reporting/graphing/tracking flexibility by running the fabric manager on a special host. You can't get those features by doing it on the switch. The switch-based way is much simpler and more consistent, but the host-based way is much more flexible and gives you more information. I honestly don't know how Qlogic (owner of Silverstorm) does it. I haven't talked to them in a while about how they manage their fabrics. I'm assuming that you are talking with Voltaire based upon your feature list. They are a good company to work with, overall, but so is Mellanox. If you want/need the features, you should probably do it the vendor way, but you can tweak it somewhat. If you want to do it your way, you can talk to Mellanox and get some of the features at probably a reduced price. I'm not sure what Qlogic will offer. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
