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Art Center Avoids $135K in Storage Costs

With help from ASG, the Art Center College of Design avoids $135K in storage costs with a NetApp virtualized infrastructure.

From the ASG official blogRSS Feed

Virtualization and Data Protection - The Right Approach (Post 1 of 2)

Virtualization and Data Protection - The Right Approach (Post 1 of 2)
Server virtualization delivers clear benefits, including a greater return on your server investment and a reduction of power and cooling costs. But it also presents a number of challenges.

Brocade

Brocade

Brocade is an industry leader in data center networking solutions and services that enable organizations to manage their most vital information assets. Brocade has pioneered the technologies that enable highly reliable and secure data center connectivity. Today most of the world’s data flows through Brocade equipment and data center networks built on Brocade technology.

Brocade products are designed to help IT organizations manage and profit from their data assets in the most efficient, cost-effective manner. The Brocade family of data center networking solutions includes data center backbones and Storage Area Network (SAN) products such as industry-leading switches, directors, routers, embedded switches for blade servers, fabric-based applications, and management software. Additional data center infrastructure solutions include intelligent file management solutions for file data and storage resources in File Area Network (FAN) environments.

Featured Products

Layer 2/3 Ethernet Switches (Brocade FastIron Products)

These products enhance power operation and simplify system configuration, utilizing a rich suite of security features—including IP source guard, dynamic Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) inspection, and DHCP snooping—to protect against internal and external threats. With the industry’s highest Class 3 Power Over Ethernet (POE) capacity, Brocade FastIron switches provide up to 15.4 watts—enabling a convergence-ready infrastructure.

Data Center Switches (Brocade BigIron Products)

The Brocade BigIron RX Series of Layer 2/3 Ethernet switches enables organizations to deploy Ethernet infrastructures that address today’s requirements while supporting scalable network growth and evolution over time. These switches incorporate the latest advances in architecture, system resilience, quality of service, and security in a family of modular chassis. Available in four chassis models, the Brocade BigIron RX Series enables organizations to standardize on a single product family for aggregation and backbone switching.

Routers (Brocade NetIron Products)

Brocade offers two families of routers:

  • Brocade NetIron XMR Series
  • Brocade NetIron MLX Series

Brocade NetIron XMR Series routers provide state-of-the-art hardware and software design, and are based on a superior terabit-scale architecture that includes leading-edge, fifth-generation network processors. As a result, they comprise the industry’s most powerful, high-density family of IPv4/IPv6/MPLS multiservice routers.

Layer 4-7 Switches (Brocade ServerIron Products)

These innovative switches provide high-performance application switching, enabling highly secure, always-on server and application infrastructures. These highly intelligent switches use information that resides deep in the application messages (beyond the traditional Layer 2/3 packet headers) to direct client transactions to the appropriate servers.

Security Devices (Brocade SecureIron Products)

These security traffic managers provide high-performance Layer 2-7 switching and security, enabling organizations to deploy highly secure and scalable network and application infrastructures. These solutions are designed to protect against network- and application-layer threats across the network—at the network perimeter, inside the data center, and within the enterprise LAN. The solutions utilize Brocade SecureWorks software to further protect networks and applications against high-speed attacks.

Wireless Devices (Brocade IronPoint Products)

These wireless products provide a comprehensive solution for enterprises of all sizes. The IronPoint Mobility Series of controllers and 802.11 a/b/g/n access points provides best-in-class converged wireless performance in high-density environments. The access points feature best-in-class security, Voice over WLAN (VoWLAN) support, and the reliability to support enterprise-class wireless performance. In addition, they go beyond basic over-the-air protection by providing multilayered security policies in conjunction with Brocade IronPoint Mobility Controllers.

Backbones and SAN Directors

These backbones and directors are used by organizations worldwide as the foundation for mission-critical SAN environments. High-speed, robust Brocade storage networks enable organizations to access and share data in a consolidated, manageable, and scalable manner. Brocade backbones and directors also help organizations protect existing investments by providing proven compatibility with a full range of Brocade products.

Fabric Management Software

Fabric management software is essential to simplifying overall storage management, and Brocade provides a comprehensive portfolio of offerings that improve efficiency and resource utilization for networked storage environments.

  • Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM™)
  • Brocade IronView Network Manager (INM)
  • The Brocade SAN Health Family

SAN Routing and Fibre Channel Extension over IP

These solutions ensure reliable routing, extension, and disaster recovery—with interoperability across Brocade platforms.The Brocade 7500 Extension Switch, the Brocade 7500E Extension Switch, and the Brocade FR4-18i SAN Extension Blade (for use in the Brocade DCX and Brocade 48000) provide the highest-performing and broadest feature set in regard to Fibre Channel routing and extension over IP (FC-IP) for long-distance SAN communications.

SAN Switches and Blade Server Switches

These industry-leading Brocade switches are the foundation for connecting servers and storage devices in SANs, enabling organizations to access Brocade Product Plan and Portfolio 7 and share data in a high-performance, manageable, and scalable manner. These switches offer flexible configurations ranging from 8 to 80 ports, and can function as core or edge switches, are fully forward and backward compatible across the Brocade product portfolio enabling organizations to deploy 1, 2, 4, and 8 Gbit/sec fabrics with highly scalable core-to-edge configurations.

Storage Virtualization Platforms

Brocade continues to provide the most cost-effective virtualization and storage application platforms with the Brocade 7600 Application Platform and the Brocade FA4-18 Application Platform Blade (for use in the Brocade DCX and Brocade 48000). These platforms are the delivery vehicle for Brocade applications as well as third-party applications from industry-leading vendors.

Server Connectivity Solutions

Brocade server connectivity solutions reliably connect servers to storage networks in a wide range of data center environments. Brocade 4 and 8 Gbit/sec Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) provide breakthrough performance, robust services, built-in extensibility, and seamless interoperability. Moreover, they are interoperable with the vast majority of the global installed base of SAN switch ports.

File Management Solutions

Brocade file management solutions will be managed as part of the new Layer 4-7 (L4-7) switch product family. The current L4-7 products optimize application layer traffic and include protocols such as name resolution (Domain Name System) and Web traffic (http). Combining the two product families will extend application layer traffic to include file sharing protocols such as CIFS and NFS.