Optical Network Installation Guide

Short Description
This document is intended to serve as a guide for architecting and deploying fiber optic networks in a customer environment. This installation planning guide describes some basic fundamentals of fiber optic technology, considerations for deployment, and basic testing and troubleshooting procedures.

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Content
1. Introduction
The purpose of this paper is to present a practical guide for the installation of a Fibre Channel infrastructure as it relates to a Storage Area Network (SAN). This document includes the background information necessary for a successful installation.
This installation guide is designed for storage network installation technicians, administrators or architects who are already familiar with Data ONTAP® Administration, Active/Active configurations, and MetroCluster and are considering deployments for production environments.
2. General overview of SAN fiber network
Storage area networks (SANs) provide the data communication infrastructure for advanced storage systems. While general-purpose networks, such as LANs, enable communication between servers, a SAN utilizes multiple paths to connect servers and storage systems. SAN technology offers many advantages including cost effectiveness, advanced management features, resilient solutions for fast backup and restoration, business continuance, and data security. In order to take full advantage of its capabilities, a SAN is designed differently than and maintained separately from general-purpose networks.
In SANs, Fibre Channel (FC) has become the industry’s de facto fast-switching-system standard for connecting client computers and servers to highly scalable volumes of data. A Fibre Channel network provides connectivity among heterogeneous devices and supports multiple interconnect topologies and the simultaneous use of various transport protocols (IP, SCSI, iSCSI).
Fibre Channel network solutions operating at data rates of 1 Gbps and 2 Gbps have been widely deployed in SANs, with 4 Gb/s now becoming more common. Already 8 Gbps FC—the newest industry-approved standard—is being used in high-end deployments. The FC standard specifies multimode fiber and single-mode fiber as the primary media types. The fiber type recommended depends on the desired distance and data rate. The primary application is for data center SANs over multimode fiber operating at 850 nm, such as laser-optimized 50/125 µm multimode fiber. Links between buildings may require single-mode fiber.
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