Considerations when sharing data ports

When determining whether sharing a data 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 sharing data ports is the best intercluster connectivity solution:

• For a high-speed network, such as a 40-Gigabit Ethernet (40-GbE) network, a sufficient amount of local LAN bandwidth might be available to perform replication on the same 40-GbE ports that are used for data access.

  In many cases, the available WAN bandwidth is far less than 10 GbE LAN bandwidth.

• All nodes in the cluster might have to replicate data and share the available WAN bandwidth, making data port sharing more acceptable.
• Sharing ports for data and replication eliminates the extra port counts required to dedicate ports for replication.
• The maximum transmission unit (MTU) size of the replication network will be the same size as that used on the data network.
• 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.
• When data ports for intercluster replication are shared, the intercluster LIFs can be migrated to any other intercluster-capable port on the same node to control the specific data port that is used for replication.