Qlogic SANbox 5202 Supplementary Manual

Brand: Qlogic

Model: SANbox 5202

Type: Supplementary Manual

QLogic SANbox 5202 is a powerful Fibre Channel switch that provides exceptional performance, scalability, and reliability for demanding storage networking environments. With its 32Gb/s throughput, 10GbE connectivity, and advanced features like Layer 2 and Layer 3 routing, the SANbox 5202 is ideal for mission-critical applications that require fast and reliable data access.

C A S E S T U D Y

Beijing

Planetarium

Beijing Planetarium Implements

a SAN to Harness a New Universe

of Data

Organization

Beijing Planetarium

Industry

Video Production

Location

Beijing, China

Applications

Xsan

Solution Set

Planetarium Digital Video Programs Editing System, in

conjunction with a Fibre Channel SA N

Products Used

Redundant RAID storage, Xsan from Apple, dual Mac G5s,

and two (2) QLogic SA Nbox(R) 5202 stackable Fibre Channel

Switches

The SANbox 5000 series switches are the only stackable Fibre Channel switches in

the industry today, providing high bandwidth and unmatched scalability for future

super high bandwidth upgrade requirement. This scalability is achieved with 10Gbps

Inter-switch links (ISLs) that connect switches together at blazing fast speeds, without

sacriﬁcing valuable user ports.

Introduction to China’s Beijing Planetarium

The Beijing Planetarium contains three main parts: the old facility of Beijing Planetarium,

the new facility of Beijing Planetarium, and Beijing ancient observatory. With a

construction area of 7,000 square meters, the old facility was ﬁrst built in 1955 and

opened to public in 1957. It consists of a planetarium, an exhibition hall, a movie lecture

hall, and a public observatory.

The new facility of Beijing Planetarium, which adjoins the existing old facility building,

began to be built in 2001 and was intended to be completed in the fourth quarter of

2004, with a construction area of 20,000 square meters. The new facility is made up

of several exciting parts, including: a digital universe, a theater, 3D theater, 4D theater,

exhibition hall, solar observatory, public observatory, and an astronomy classroom.

Hand in hand with the new facility comes the digital content and High Deﬁnition (HD)

video driving its many attractions, resulting in a new universe of data. This data is

generated by the new Planetarium Digital Video Programs Editing System (PDVPES ),

which carries thousands of digital video clips that require being viewed, edited, reviewed

and broadcast anytime, day in and day out.

The business challenges that led to the installation of a SA N to manage this galaxy

of data are outlined below. These challenges quickly became apparent to Beijing

Planetarium during the implementation of the PDVPES solution.

Requirements and challenges of building the new PDVPES

1. Advanced hardware: The PDVPES processes a large amount of HD video, animation

and audio for the 3D and 4D planetary programs to be played everyday. It requires the

best high-performance hardware on the market to ensure optimum efﬁciency and

productivity for the Beijing Planetarium. To achieve this efﬁciency and productivity,

it was necessary to deploy servers with 64-bit processors, include the existing

Ethernet network, add a redundant RAID system, and add a Fibre Channel storage

area network including 2Gb and 10Gb ISL link speeds to make the solution viable.

2. Ease of use: The user and management interface in any aspect of the solution must

be easy to learn and easy to use. This would signiﬁcantly improve the efﬁciency of

all personnel who would use the system to edit, broadcast, and maintain the digital

videos, as well as manage the infrastructure

The Core of PDVPES

PDVPES consists of seven major sectors. 1. Animation Editing System, 2. Sound and music

Editing System; 3. Rendering Cluster; 4. Post Production System; 5. Video Projection System;

6. Online and ofﬂine Storage System; 7. High Speed Communication Network. The core of the

PDVPES is the high-speed communications network running the Fibre Channel SA N provided

by QLogic, as well as Xsan technology from Apple. With dual Apple Xserve G5s as the MDC

server cluster, all the sectors in the PDVPES will be able to share very large amounts of data

from the Storage System at very high rates of speed.

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C A S E S T U D Y

3. Reliability: The Planetarium opens to the general public all year round.

The Planetarium’s video system has to be available everyday to fulﬁll the

requirement of all planetarium visitors in China. A key requirement was

implementing a highly available architecture with full redundancy for

long-term stability and continuous up-time, to ensure non-stop operation

of the system.

4. Open technology: The system must be employing the latest open

communications technology to allow integration of products from different

manufacturers. It should also cater to scaling the SAN with future products.

For example, Fibre Channel, TCP/IP, Firewire 800 & Firewire 400, USB2.0

in communication standards and SMB, AFP, NFS & XSAN from Apple.

5. Cost effectiveness: The price/performance of all the hardware and software

to be deployed must meet the tight budget of PDVPES.

6. Scalability: The PDVPES is divided in to three phases of deployment. Each

phase of the architecture must allow a very ﬂexible and seamless upgrade

to the next phase. Therefore, the system architecture, connectivity of

products, processing power, storage capacity, SAN and network bandwidth

must be upgradeable and scalable to fulﬁll the increasing demand from

Planetarium users.

7. Serviceability and Management: To cope with the fully automated

management system in the Planetarium, all the hardware and software

components must provide an interface to be monitored by a central

management station. The operation status and fault alarms have to be

reported automatically. Furthermore, Graphical User Interface is required

for each component to be managed.

The Solution with Qlogic

In the core of the PDVPES , QLogic SA Nbox® 5000 series Fibre Channel

switches are being deployed in the solution because they meet all of the most

demanding requirements of the Beijing Planetarium production environment.

All the video data transfer, manipulation and data management must be fast

and effective to allow the staff to perform their jobs quickly and easily.

During the ﬁrst phase of the deployment, Beijing Planetarium required

approximately 30 Fibre Channel ports for host and device connectivity. The SA

Nbox 5000 price point and scalability ﬁts the needs of the Planetarium perfectly.

Two stacked SA Nbox 5202’s provided 32 usable device ports which meet the

initial port requirement, as well as the tight budget. And simple scalability is

a necessity, because it’s hard to guess just how rapidly the storage volume

needs will increase, along with the editing effort and processors required

in the future digital planetary videos. The SA Nbox 5000 series switch can

scale all the way to 96 ports, or even more, and is the perfect solution for

accommodating this exponential growth in future phases.

The Conﬁguration Wizard walks you through the steps to deploy the fabric

easily, without any help from any technical experts. The Beijing Planetarium

staff feel comfortable being able to observe their data trafﬁc moving smoothly

across different ports. Also, SA Nbox 5000 allows the Planetarium staff to

conﬁgure the type of fault alarms they want, and where it should be sent to.

Though the Planetarium isn’t expecting any error message from the switch, in

the unlikely event of a system issue, they will be the ﬁrst to know. And that’s

called peace of mind in an uncertain universe.

© 2006 QLogic Corporation. All rights reserved. QLogic, the QLogic Logo, the Powered by QLogic Logo, and SA Nbox are registered trademarks or trademarks of QLogic Corporation. All other brands and product names are trademarks or registered trademarks

of their respective owners. Information supplied by QLogic is believed to be accurate and reliable. QLogic Corporation assumes no responsibility for any errors in this brochure. QLogic Corporation reserves the right, without notice, to makes changes in product

design or speciﬁcations.

SN0130915-00 Rev A 10/06

Infrastructure Diagram of the Beijing Planetarium Digital Video Program Editing Platform