Several technology advances are increasing SAN (storage area networking) bandwidth demands, including private cloud computing, application growth and server virtualization. Thus, smarter data centers use higher-speed storage backbones so that data transfers are faster, fewer links are needed to accomplish the same task, fewer devices need to be managed and less power is consumed. In addition to high performance and ease of management, IBM’s SAN solutions with Brocade technology also address one of the biggest needs in today’s data centers – the need to provide standards-based solutions that are truly interoperable.

IBM and Brocade are able to facilitate strategic business objectives such as consolidation, network convergence, virtualization and cloud computing with a full range of 8 Gigabits/sec and 16 Gigabits/sec SAN switches, directors and management software.

IBM and Brocade are working together to fulfill the promise of smarter storage area networking by empowering clients to:

• Deploy system storage fabric solutions designed for smooth migration to private cloud architectures.
• Manage and exploit hyper growth virtualization of workloads.
• Upgrade due to end-of-life/support, lease expiration, technology refresh, or consolidation.
• Adopt solid state drive technology.
• Increase availability.
• Deploy site-to-site replication and backup or changes to disaster recovery plans.
• Scale up bandwidth simply and easily from 4 to 8 to 16 Gigabits/sec.
• Reduce operational and capital expenditures.