Driving IT Efficiencies

Rapid changes in hardware, technology, and capacity demands are forcing enterprises to implement ongoing server and storage consolidation and data migration strategies to optimize available storage assets. Consolidating widely distributed or underutilized resource into centrally managed environments, or migrating data, are no longer point-in-time projects for administrators.  There are impressive technical and business advantages to consolidation in the data center. A SAN infrastructure enables any-to-any connectivity between heterogeneous server and storage systems. This allows much more efficient use of storage and server resources by consolidating widely distributed or underutilized resource into centrally managed environments to:

• Increase storage utilization by lowering allocation for headroom—unused storage that will be used within one to two years
• Decrease storage capital expenditures by enabling the purchase of storage on an "as-needed" basis
• Increase administrative staff productivity and be able to manage more storage with fewer personnel
• Reduce application downtime and minimize business impact for storage upgrades
• Create a centralized network environment for storage and server platforms

A More Robust Business Solution

Traditionally, organizations have paired storage resources with specific servers, primarily because of technical restrictions. This implementation results in poor utilization of storage resources because the storage is dedicated to each server and not shared among servers. For example, free disk space on one server's disk subsystem cannot be used by other storage-constrained servers.  This paired server-device model has proven to be especially inflexible during periods of expansion. Simply adding more resources as requirements grow typically results in a very difficult environment to manage and poor utilization of resources. In addition, when organizations have to buy a greater number of servers and storage devices, they tend to choose less expensive, slower, and less reliable ones.

SANs provide unprecedented flexibility for storage environments—changing the way storage resources can be purchased and managed. By enabling any-to-any server and storage connectivity via switches, SANs decouple dedicated devices and enable storage resource sharing. This cost-effective open systems approach enables the selection of best-of-breed heterogeneous.

Data Center Infrastructure

Over the past few years, the number of server, device, and Fibre Channel SAN ports in data centers has skyrocketed—growing by a factor of 10 to 100, or even more. At the same time, Fibre Channel data rates have increased from 1 Gbit/sec to 8 Gbit/sec. This dramatic growth in both the size and speed of data center infrastructures has turned cable management into a large and growing problem for many organizations. Troubleshooting and reconfiguration with traditional cabling is often difficult and time-consuming. Scalability is also problematic, resulting in inefficiency and increased costs. In order to fully leverage the increased bandwidth, performance, and advanced management capabilities of industry-leading technology, a structured cabling solution can be customized for each unique environment.

• Success Stories

  • SAP Americas: Boosting SAN Capacity for Booming Managed Services Business (171.7 KB)

• Technical Briefs

  • Optimizing Data Center Consolidation with Server Virtualization (269.6 KB)

  • Using the Brocade DCX Backbone to Transform a Brocade SAN into a Data Center Fabric (541.4 KB)

• White Papers

  • A Real-World Look at Data Center Relocation (269.8 KB)

  • Optimizing Storage Data Transfers Over FC ISLs and Long-Distance FCIP WAN Links with FastWrite (153.8 KB)