How many ISL ports are required between the cluster interconnect switches when using Cisco switches?

2 ISL ports are insufficient to meet the bandwidth and redundancy requirements defined for Cisco Nexus switches in a clustered ONTAP interconnect.

4 ISL ports satisfy the CN1610 switch requirement but fall short of the 8 required for Cisco Nexus switches.

6 ISL ports do not match the documented requirement of 8 ISLs for Cisco Nexus cluster interconnect switches.

The NetApp reference configuration for Cisco Nexus cluster interconnect switches specifies 8 Inter-Switch Links (ISLs) between the two switches. This quantity provides the necessary aggregate bandwidth and redundancy to support the high-speed, low-latency traffic demands of the ONTAP cluster interconnect network.

ISLs are required between cluster interconnect switches to carry inter-node traffic - removing them would prevent nodes from communicating across the cluster.