Sponsor: Brocade

Today, despite the publicity out there, fibre channel remains the dominant protocol, not only in architectures supporting online databases, but also virtual infrastructures. Although speed and bandwidth are huge assets to storage architectures, they are only part of the equation – don’t get solely focused on the number behind the Gbps. In this on-demand webcast, George Crump, lead analyst at Storage Switzerland, will explore the next generation storage architectures, and focus on why speed alone is not enough – granular control, visibility, scalability and performance all hold the same weight.

Goodbye ballooning costs. Hello efficient cloud. Enterprises and service providers are migrating to highly virtualized, cloud-based service models to accelerate new service delivery and drive innovation while also reducing costs. The Forrester Total Economic Impact study, "The Total Economic Impact of Brocade VCS Fabric Technology", proves that with VCS fabric technology, organizations can expect a 41 percent ROI when upgrading to these highly virtualized, next-generation environments.

Business continue to grow in size and reach, impacted by emerging tech including cloud and virtualization. This Aberdeen white paper looks at how enterprises have been upgrading much of their infrastructure while ignoring their core network, and what they should do now to plan for the changes that mobility, BYOD, virtualization and the cloud will bring to today’s large enterprise.

This Gartner white paper forecasts changes to enterprise network capacity over the next five years by evaluating the impact of cloud, mobile, video and BYOD using a range of scenarios. It presents results gathered using Gartner’s bandwidth estimating model, useful to network planners and architects for both benchmarking and planning. It looks in depth at key challenges that enterprises will face in regard to major changes in capacity, usage, technology and network architecture through 2017.

This paper provides an overview of Software-Defined Networking (SDN), its expected role in cloud-optimized networks, and outlines Brocade plans for SDN support. It discusses SDN as an emerging concept that proposes to disaggregate the traditional vertically integrated networking stack in order to improve network flexibility and manageability, showing how SDN enables "mass customization" of network operations to better support the coming multitude of differentiated cloud services.

This Brocade white paper discusses how their HyperEdge Architecture seamlessly integrates new innovations with legacy technologies, improving network flexibility and reducing management complexity, application deployment time, and operational costs. It outlines how Brocade's Effortless Network™ showcases the path that campus networks can take to achieve new levels of agility and business competitiveness by supporting the widest range of new applications, cloud-based services, and mobile users.

With the arrival of virtualization, cloud computing, and mobility; the data center must evolve to function optimally. At the same time, IT is being challenged to be more responsive and cost-efficient. To meet both of these challenges, this IDC Market Spotlight explains how a data center network fabric can provide a foundation for the automated provisioning, configuration, and ongoing management of network-based services in this new era of IT agility.

Get Gartner's recommendations for selecting the right Ethernet fabric for your data center network. This report highlights the competitive landscape of leading vendors in the data center Ethernet fabric market and provides insight into why vendors are pursuing strong end-to-end-data center network integration.

Deploying the correct Ethernet fabric is integral to any organization, but selecting it can be daunting. Fortunately, the Lippis guide Top 6 Recommendations for Selecting an Ethernet Fabric reports the findings from a recent study of several types of Ethernet fabric and provides recommendations based on the results.

This document dives into the five key requirements that enterprises of all sizes should consider when upgrading their storage networking architecture to consider that infrastructure worthy of the label "next generation". It looks at the speed, bandwidth, control, visibility, scalability and reliability minimums that must be met to ensure compatibility with tomorrow's networking and storage demands in the age of cloud and big data. IT Planners need to understand the essential requirements of a storage network architecture so they can choose between an IP protocol based on 10Gb Ethernet, like NFS or iSCSI or 16 Gbps Gen 5 Fibre Channel with 100% backward compatibility to prior generations.

This white paper looks at how flash based storage, whether it is added to an existing hard drive system or a dedicated flash array, can enable data centers to attain a greater ROI on virtualization and database application infrastructure. It looks at the ways flash supports higher levels of density, more virtual machines per host and more users per database instance, and the weaknesses exposed by a near-zero latency storage architecture to the limitations of legacy IP and Fibre Channel storage architectures.

Is your storage network infrastructure running at its peak efficiency? The Brocade SAN Health Diagnostics Capture gives you an easy, accurate, and FREE check-up on the vital statistics of your SAN fabrics and associated multi-vendor components - including switch, topology, and performance benchmarks, allowing you to take inventory of devices, switches, firmware versions, and SAN fabrics. You can capture and display historical port data, compare your zoning and switch configurations with industry best practices, and assess performance statistics while generating detailed reports and diagrams.

What drives storage upgrades? Typically, it has been the obsolescence of the prior architecture. The move to Gen 5, however, may be driven by the adoption of solid-state drives (SSDs) and the desire to quickly take advantage of these assets. This document looks at the implications of new storage technologies on the enterprise network, and how increasingly performant servers are driving the need for ever increasing levels of network performance, even if it breaks the traditional price-performance curves.

Watch this Webcast to learn: Why virtualized data centers demand a new approach to networking; How Ethernet fabric technologies create a more responsive, predictable end-user experience; and How insurance provider GEHA scaled their virtualization deployment by 3X and improved service delivery with Ethernet fabrics.

This guide summarizes research findings from the recent Lippis Open Industry Active-Active Cloud Network Fabric Test for Two-Tier Ethernet Architecture, which rigorously tested different types of Ethernet fabrics. The Lippis test's goal was to give IT architects and decision makers quantitative metrics and recommendations to help them with complex purchasing decisions.