State and local governments must support both citizens and other government agencies that want to seamlessly access services at their convenience. At the same time, budgets are shrinking—creating an ever-increasing need to "do more with less." Data center consolidation provides a fast way to meet these objectives. By consolidating widely distributed or underutilized resources into centrally managed environments, governments can achieve a variety of technical and business advantages.

For example, a consolidated environment makes it much easier to satisfy mandates such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Governments can set and enforce data policies from a centralized console much more easily than is possible over several different systems.

The benefits of data center consolidation are far-reaching:

• Improved services and information availability
• Reduced administration costs and complexity
• Lower power, cooling, and real estate costs
• Higher equipment utilization for lower total cost of ownership

However, data consolidation and migration can also present many challenges, including how to minimize downtime, support ongoing data migration efficiently, consolidate data in heterogeneous storage environments, and increase resource utilization. Brocade thoroughly understands these challenges and has developed an integrated set of solutions and services to support cost-effective, efficient data consolidation and migration throughout the data center.

• Brocade SAN Switches
• SAN Extension
• Brocade Fabric Applications