Business Continuity for Private Cloud Infrastructures
As virtualization drives the migration to private clouds, the level of virtual workloads correlate directly with an organization's private cloud-readiness. To support these highly virtualized environments, organizations need ultra-reliable, high-performance, and field-proven technologies to meet dynamic applications and workloads.

Based on the Brocade One strategy, the Brocade Fibre Channel SAN product family helps organizations deploy reliable data center fabrics that provide the foundation to meet these and other key business requirements, such as business continuity.

Data center fabric architectures address some of the most critical factors in any disaster-ready storage environment: the ability to recover data and quickly bring systems back online following a disaster. Disaster Recovery (DR) sites are located at increasing distances from the central data center to be closer to energy sources yet still be far enough away to ensure protection in the event of a catastrophic natural disaster. Internet applications and global business practices have established the 24-hour business day, severely restricting the amount of downtime available to perform regular data backup procedures. And even minutes of downtime can pose significant consequences to many types of organizations.

For today's enterprise data centers, Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery (BC/DR) is a mandatory requirement, if not for regulatory compliance then for company survival. Whether downtime costs thousands or millions of dollars per hour, a prolonged data outage leaves a company vulnerable to competition, depreciation of brand, and loss of customers. One of the persistent challenges for IT administrations is to create a workable BC/DR plan that is flexible enough to handle constant pressure from budgetary constraints and steady growth in the amount of data requiring protection.

The BC/DR solution needs to:

• Eliminate single points of failure to increase system resiliency and maximize data availability
• Incorporate failover software to prevent or better tolerate system outages
• Streamline data backup and recovery processes to reduce the time to recovery
• Enable high-performance remote backup, electronic vaulting, and mirroring at data centers separated by great distances
• Comply with corporate regulatory compliance requirements
• Provide encryption for data in flight and at rest

The Extended Data Center
Over the past decade storage networking technology has facilitated the practical implementation of today's BC/DR strategies. Organizations are no longer bound by distance or bandwidth restrictions, and it is now possible to deploy BC/DR solutions that span thousands of miles. Brocade SAN extension solutions support metro and global BC/DR requirements and have been proven in data centers worldwide.

• Success Stories

  • City of Beverly Hills: Streamlining Disaster Recovery (186.5 KB)

• Technical Briefs

  • Metro Cloud Connectivity: Integrated Metro SAN Connectivity in 16 Gbps Switches (330.4 KB)

• White Papers

  • Brocade Network Monitoring Service (NMS) Helps Maximize Network Uptime and Efficiency (713 KB)

  • Data Protection: Understanding the Benefits of Various Data Backup and Recovery Techniques (198.9 KB)