NetApp recently announced availability of the ATTO FibreBridge 6500N, a SAS-to-FC bridge for MetroCluster environments. FibreBridge enables MetroCluster storage connectivity to include SAS disk shelves (DS4243 and DS2246) in both stretch and fabric MetroCluster configurations. This enables MetroCluster environments to take advantage of higher density SAS and SATA disks and resilient back-end SAS storage architecture.Each bridge includes two 8Gb/s FC ports, a 4-lane wide 6Gb/s SAS port, 100/1000 BASE-T Ethernet port, and a serial port -- with a standard form factor of 1U.
Two bridges are deployed per homogenous stack of either SAS or SATA disks. A combination of four FibreBridges, two deployed with the local stack and two with the remote stack, provide highly-available connectivity for MetroCluster. The FibreBridge supports up to 10 shelves per stack of SAS or SATA disks. It currently does not support solid-state disks (SSDs) or full disk encryption (FDE).
FibreBridge is now available with Data ONTAP 8.1 RC2 and FibreBridge 6500N firmware version 1.11.
More information can be found on the NetApp Support Site by reviewing the document entitled, “Configuring a MetroCluster system with SAS disk shelves and FibreBridge 6500N”.
