Many enterprise data centers rely on Ethernet for their LAN and data traffic, and on Fibre Channel (FC) networks for their storage infrastructure. With increased adoption of 10GbE in the data center, the availability of Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), and new lossless 10GbE technologies, it is now possible to consolidate FC SAN storage data flows with LAN and data traffic onto the same unified Ethernet cable. Network convergence will enable enterprises to preserve their existing investments in FC storage, reduce data center costs and complexity, and simplify network management.
device-mapper (dm): working with multipath-tools. Part 1 Filed under: SCSI, Linux — admin @ 10:33 Device-mapper (hereafter, dm) is one of the best collection of device drivers that I have ever worked with. It brings high availability, flexibility and more to the Linux 2.6 kernel. Device-mapper is a Linux 2.6 kernel infrastructure that provides a generic way to create virtual layers of a block device while supporting stripping, mirroring, snapshots, concatenation, multipathing, etc. While many modules are built on top of device-mapper, the focus of this article is on multipath-tools. Note that I will be using the terms multipath, multipath-tools and dm-multipath interchangeably to signify the same package. Also note that dm-multipath is the name of the repackaged multipath-tools redistributed under Red Hat in their Advanced Server Linux distribution.