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hesoyam
Asked: 2017-05-31 06:38:23 +0800 CST

Link Aggregation Control Protocol or Multipath I/O

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I am building a new sub-cluster, thereby I am facing few questions.

  1. Which technology is more efficient for "boosting throughput" ? (Will be great if you can provide any comparison) As far as I done my google job, there are two technology's which provides additional paths inside one NIC. Link Aggregation Control Protocol and Multipath I/O. It would be great if some one can provide me with any benefits or drawbacks of these technology.

(I am asking the second qestion from curiosity , just want to hear your opinion)

  1. Which connection is preferable (Ethernet of FC)?

I heared that Ethernet connection is slower when it comes to comparing Ethernet and FC.

mpio

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Ethernet interconnection is preferable than Fiber Channel not only for the FC price tag, and due to the ease to manage and features it delivers.

    Main concerns why to go with Ethernet are following:

    1. Flash: Fast Storage Needs Fast Networking.

    Modern Ethernet supports speeds of 100Gb/s per link, with latencies of several microseconds, and combined with the hardware-accelerated iSER block protocol, it’s perfect for supporting maximum performance on non-volatile memory (NVM), whether today’s flash or tomorrow’s next-gen solid state storage.

    1. Modern Ethernet Outperforms Fibre Channel

    Today’s Ethernet runs at 25, 40, 50, or 100Gb/s speeds. Meanwhile, Fibre Channel is still transitioning to 16Gb/s technology and thinking about 32Gb/s in 2016, which is slower than what Ethernet was supporting 3 years ago.

    1. iSER Turbocharges iSCSI

    iSER adds RDMA support to iSCSI. This lets the network cards offload the iSCSI protocol and network transport to the NIC, supporting even higher performance and lower latency with low CPU utilization.

    For more reasons should read the quoted article: http://www.mellanox.com/blog/2015/12/top-7-reasons-why-fibre-channel-is-doomed/

    That being said, the options to boost the throughput are Link Aggregation Control Protocol and Multipath I/O. If your concern is redundancy and failover, you can use any of those technologies to achieve the resiliency. For cases when the performance is required, concern to go with MPIO since it allows to use more links thus more throughput to be achieved. For a deep dive in the comparison check the original post: https://www.starwindsoftware.com/blog/lacp-vs-mpio-on-windows-platform-which-one-is-better-in-terms-of-redundancy-and-speed-in-this-case-2.

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  2. FC will be always preferable but you require SAN Switch, Storage , FC connector to configure the FC. FC will give you 128 gigabit per second speed. High-Availability or speed is the main concern then go for FC otherwise Ethernet will be fine.

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