Considerations when using dedicated ports

When determining whether using a dedicated port for intercluster replication is the correct intercluster network solution, you should consider configurations and requirements such as LAN type, available WAN bandwidth, replication interval, change rate, and number of ports.

Consider the following aspects of your network to determine whether using a dedicated port is the best intercluster network solution:

• If the amount of available WAN bandwidth is similar to that of the LAN ports and the replication interval is such that replication occurs while regular client activity exists, then you should dedicate Ethernet ports for intercluster replication to avoid contention between replication and the data protocols.
• If the network utilization generated by the data protocols (CIFS, NFS, and iSCSI) is such that the network utilization is above 50 percent, then you should dedicate ports for replication to allow for nondegraded performance if a node failover occurs.
• When physical 10 GbE or faster ports are used for data and replication, you can create VLAN ports for replication and dedicate the logical ports for intercluster replication.

  The bandwidth of the port is shared between all VLANs and the base port.

• Consider the data change rate and replication interval and whether the amount of data that must be replicated on each interval requires enough bandwidth that it might cause contention with data protocols if sharing data ports.