UCS -> Storage Direct Connectivity

[douglasfir]

Hello,

Is it possible to connect two UCSC-220 servers directly to storage (without any interconnection between)? If possible, which interface could be used for that? The idea would be not to use any local storage on UCSs, except SD cards to run ESXi.

Thanks,

Dragan

[Aaron Harrison]

Hi

Sure, they have PCI card slots so you can add FC cards and connect them to a SAN.

If you are talking UCS server that are used for UC, be aware that they are built to a particular specification to support UC apps, and if you vary from this you need to ensure your storage performs well enough to support the load or you may have issues with the application, and thereby with support. Cisco UC products are designed to cluster between the application nodes, so you don't generally benefit greatly from moving them to shared storage from local.

Aaron

[douglasfir]

Hi Aaron,

Thank you for the answer! I really wasn't sure if this would be feasible at all. You are also right that there is no any benefit from moving to storage, since  the redundancy is achieved by clustering UC products across different servers. Moreover, there is even less redundancy in my opinion if we use storage, because the customer has some weird plan to use only one storage server and unfortunately we couldn't convince them not to go this way. Anyway, we can now specify the equipment and check if it's officially supported by Cisco.

Thanks again!

Regards, Dragan

[Aaron Harrison]

Hi

OK - so it sounds like an ill thought out plan. It almost certainly won't be fully supported by Cisco, even if it's Cisco storage... it's the customer's design, sounds like it lacks resilience, and performance may be a grey area...

Aaron