Technical data

DATA CENTER TECHNICAL BRIEF
Operational Simplicity: Automating and Simplifying SAN Provisioning 3 of 15
INTRODUCTION
As customers look to Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (FC SANs) for building private storage cloud services
for their enterprise data centers, some of the key requirements are:
•Consolidated and highly virtualized pools of compute, storage, and network resources
•Secure and efcient use of inter-fabric connectivity
•Lower capital and operational costs, higher asset utilization
•On-demand and efcient provisioning of application resources through automated management
Brocade has developed solutions to address these key requirements, leveraging the Brocade® Application-
Specic Integrated Circuit (ASIC) and Brocade Fabric OS® (FOS) version 7.x in the Gen 5 Fibre Channel
platforms, Brocade Network Advisor, and Brocade Host Bus Adapter (HBA) and Converged Network Adapter
(CNA) technology (as well as working with transceiver vendors) to address these key requirements. To enable
customers to achieve their goals, Brocade is delivering key technologies (see Figure 1) that allow customers to:
•Scale up/out based on business growth
•Secure data and optimize inter–data center bandwidth utilization
•Reduce CapEx and OpEx cost with built-in diagnostics and innovative SAN monitoring and management tools
•Optimize both bandwidth and Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) while being energy efcient
Fig01_enabling-private-storage-clouds
Hyper-Scale
Fabrics
•
•
•
Scale-out optical
UltraScale ICLs
Scale-up UltraScale
ICL ports-on-demand
128 Gbps ISL
Trunks
Metro Cloud
Connectivity
•
•
•
Integrated DWDM
and dark ber
In-ight encryption
and compression
Resilient metro links
Operational
Simplicity
•
•
•
ClearLink cable and
optics diagnostics
Simple threshold-
based monitoring
and alerting
Health and
performance
dashboard views
Cloud-Optimized
Performance
•
•
•
Higher IOPS
Twice the bandwidth
Energy efcient
ASICs
Figure 1. Enabling private storage clouds.
OPERATIONALSIMPLICITY
Brocade SAN fabrics provide a secure, low-latency, and high-performance infrastructure for the mission-critical
applications on which Fortune 1000 companies depend. With higher density virtualized environments, new
and evolving workloads, and the increasing adoption of ash-based storage, network reliability, availability, and
optimized performance become even more critical. While these technologies help meet business goals, they
can also increase management complexity and drive up operational costs. In the current business environment
where administrators have to do more with less, technology can be used to simplify management and reduce
manually intensive and error-prone tasks.
This is one of several technical briefs that address Brocade solutions for helping customers in their transition
to private storage clouds. This paper describes tools that are available on the Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel
platforms for infrastructure diagnostics, proactive monitoring and alerting, and zone management, as well as the
benets that these tools can provide in your SAN infrastructure.