License additional SAN ports or upgrade SAN?

[FrankieAIX]

We are currently out of SAN ports at our off-site QA/DR site. At the QA/DR site we have (2) 5300-B SAN switches for redundancy. Currently each switch is licensed for 48 ports, we need additional ports to support new equipment that will be installed as well as to support our environment during Disaster Recovery.

The way I see it, we have two options:

1.) License the additional ports we need on the 5300-B's.
2.) Replace the 5300-B's with Director Class Switch(s) with the required amount of ports.

The environment is used heavily on a day to day basis for QA. The environment consists of EMC DMX, IBM XiV, p770 with 20+ LPAR's, 12 IBM Blade Centers (65% populated) and about a dozen stand alone servers.

Putting budget aside... Which do you think would be the better route to pursue?


Thanks!

-Frankie

 

[RMGBELGIUM]

Taking into account it is "only" a DR site, I would go for the additional ports on existing switches. The 5300 are already considered as quite high-end switches that can be put as core switches of your SAN (redundant fans,PSU's, and ability to load and apply microcode without application downtime ).Only if the current switches can hardly pull the load right now, I would go for director class switches. You should also consider the budget of course, as enabling additional ports also comes at a nice cost

rgds,

R.

NetApp Certified NCDA/NCIE-SAN