GEC NEWS WIREDeployment of Brocade’s Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN interconnection platform significantly reduce energy costs
Rackspace has improved the scalability, flexibility and performance in eight of its data centers across three continents with the deployment of Brocade’s Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN interconnection platform. With a 200,000 plus and growing customer base, the cloud giant is moving to a campus-style data center model, and Brocade’s Gen 5 Fibre Channel director-class switches have allowed Rackspace to simplify its SAN infrastructure while better utilizing both space and power within its data centers to significantly reduce energy costs.
Gen 5 Fibre Channel, the latest evolution in SANs, doubles the data throughput of 8 Gbps links, from 800 Megabytes per second (MB/sec) to 1600 MB/sec. Commenting on the deployment, Sean Wedige, CTO, Enterprise Solutions, at Rackspace said that his organization worked together with its storage array provider, EMC and Brocade to design a SAN fabric that was “ easy to grow and manage, while providing the flexibility to allow our data center technicians to connect any device to any switch in the fabric.”
“In addition to improved reliability and availability, the new Brocade SAN fabric has allowed us to use less space and power, supporting our green initiatives, while allowing us better utilization of our physical facilities,” added Wedige.
Rackspace has also employed the ‘at-a-glance dashboard’ feature of Brocade’s Fabric Vision technology to receive customized views for visibility and insight into the health and performance of each SAN from a single pane of glass. The cloud vendor will next look to enable the solution’s Flow Vision and ClearLink diagnostics features. These will enable Rackspace’s administrators to analyze, monitor and ultimately optimize application data flows.
“As a cloud service provider, Rackspace’s strict service-level agreements with customers demanded the highest levels of availability, scalability and operational simplicity that only Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel can provide,” said Jack Rondoni, vice president, Data Center Storage and Solutions, at Brocade. “In addition, our long-term partnership with EMC assured a seamless migration to the new SAN infrastructure in connecting to storage.”
