52 SAN Multiprotocol Routing: An Introduction and Implementation
performance of an inter-fabric link (IFL) is practically the same as performance of
a 4 Gbps inter-switch link (ISL).
The 2109-A16 is different in one respect: It supports speeds up to 2 Gbps.
Due to having a separate application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for each
port, the 2109-A16 supports exchange-level trunking, instead of the frame-level
trunking available in the switches in the IBM TotalStorage b-type SAN family.
4.5.2 FCIP tunneling performance
FCIP performance is a complex issue, because it is affected by many separate
factors, such as performance of the FCIP links and latency caused by the FCIP
encapsulation itself.
In general, an FCIP link has significantly lo ...