Technology Overview

The following figure shows the cabling diagram for all the Ready Stack components. 100 GbE requires QSFP28 cabling and 25 GbE requires SFP28 cabling. We recommend Dell EMC Networking passive copper direct attach cables. These cables are available in various lengths based on the rack layout. Dell EMC Networking active optical cables are also available for longer distances and dense rack configurations.

Figure 2.        Ready Stack network cabling diagram

Connectrix DS-6500 switches are prepopulated with the required Fibre Channel (FC) optics. The following is a high-level summary of the required cable components for the switches, servers, and storage that are shown in Figure 2:

• Additional 16 GB SFP FC adapters for Unity arrays and PowerEdge servers.
• An LC-LC optical multimode cable between PowerEdge servers and Unity arrays to Connectrix FC switches.
• Cat 5e Ethernet cabling for Dell EMC iDRAC, Connectrix, and Unity management.
• For small configurations, it is possible to cable 1 GbE devices to top-of-rack (ToR) switches using a 1000Base-T small form-factor pluggable (SFP) transceiver. Doing this can eliminate the need for the Dell Networking S3048-ON switch in some cases. However, as a best practice, we recommend using a dedicated out-of-band (OOB) management switch.