Brocade SAN Solutions help organizations "do more with less" enabling them to stay competitive in today's dynamic business environment. Implementing a Fibre Channel SAN can enable organizations to scale storage more effectively, support continuous data availability, and reduce the overall cost of storage management.

As enterprise data becomes a much more valuable business asset, ensuring its stability and protection is more critical than ever. Many organizations have faced the challenge of having to back up more and more data even as backup windows have continued to shrink. In fact, many organizations have discovered that they cannot back up all their data as consistently or as cost-effectively as they would like. Instead, they have been forced to devise different backup strategies for various types of enterprise data that vary according to how "mission-critical" the data is.

Many organizations have already realized the significant advantages SANs can provide as a vital component of a strategic business continuance solution. In addition to ensuring user failover, organizations must find ways to centralize business continuity management in heterogeneous, distributed environments while keeping IT costs at a minimum.

Due to service-level agreements, industry regulations, or other business needs, companies today demand the highest possible system availability. In fact, incidents that were previously viewed as minor unplanned outages can now impact business operations severely. To address this requirement, Storage Area Networks (SANs) are designed to facilitate a high-availability environment that can help prevent (or better tolerate) system outages.

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.

Implementing a SAN infrastructure can provide an organization with a variety of benefits - such as improved performance, efficiency, availability, and cost savings. However, to maximize the value of their investments, organizations need to protect their SANs against a wide range of potential security threats.