Fibre Channel Primer

7 Chapter 2: Fibre Channel at Work
MULTIPLATFORM STORAGE
A typical company has reorganized, combined departments,
decentralized, recentralized, bought other companies, outsourced IT
operations, and brought IT operations back in-house. The result is an
array of products that IT departments are challenged with integrating
and utilizing. They must preserve this investment and still meet the
information processing, storage, and distribution requirements of the
enterprise.
Fibre Channel solutions offer IT managers new tools to meet
this challenge, providing these benefits:
l Investment protection
l Centralized management of storage
l More efficient use of storage
l Centralized backup and recovery
l Enterprise-wide access to storage
Fibre Channel networks interface storage devices and deploy scalable
gigabit storage-to-server and server-to-server communications. They
may use storage and network protocols concurrently. For example,
server-to-storage links using SCSI and server-to-server
communications with IP create new possibilities for optimizing
storage utilization. Network storage means more than NFS or FTP. It
means servers sharing RAID, servers sharing tape backup systems,
workstations sharing SCSI peripherals, users working on the same
file, and protection of investments in SCSI-based systems.
Users who have implemented shared storage have found it helps
slow down the explosive demand for storage capacity. Instead of
duplicating files, they are effectively shared using Fibre Channel.
IT managers do their best to cost-effectively utilize all resources,
providing reliable, responsive service to internal and external
customers. Fibre Channel solutions integrate servers and storage using
enterprise-wide networks unencumbered with desktop traffic. The
result is better management of storage, better desktop performance,
and the means to implement client/server applications effectively.