Data infrastructure white papers

Understanding the value of your information is critical for modern organizations. Information Governance is a concept that pulls together key capabilities that organizations need in order to manage risk, improve efficiency and ultimately improve the value of their information.

Compared to classic hierarchical Ethernet architectures, Ethernet fabrics provide the higher levels of performance, utilization, availability & simplicity required to meet the business needs of data centers today and into the future.

Everyone, it seems, is talking about the cloud. This white paper is one of a series that aims to move beyond the hype that currently surrounds the cloud. This paper looks at the role the cloud plays in making networked IT more efficient.

Brocade's vision, captured in the Brocade One strategy, is a smooth transition to a world where information and applications reside anywhere in the cloud - and to help customers make that transition. The Brocade One Data Center strategy simplifies network architectures and maximizes solution flexibility and choice. Unlike competitive approaches, Brocade One unlocks the full potential of the network without dictating a specific design or components.

Brocade VCS technology is designed to revolutionize the way data center networks are architected and how they function.

As demand for greater processing continues to outstrip available space, power and air-conditioning, the market has turned to server virtualisation in order to maximize resources. Recognising that having hundreds of servers running at 5% utilisation is a waste, virtualisation has become a key driver for energy efficiency as well significantly reducing organizations' IT infrastructure spend.

Preparing a data center for virtualization and cloud computing does not have to be an all-or-nothing proposition. Organizations can control risk and reduce costs by choosing a cost-effective, phased network architecture upgrade that enables new levels of application flexibility and business agility.

The Brocade data center architecture provides a blueprint for building a cost-effective data center with products, services, and partner alliances to reduce the complexity of connecting, accessing, protecting, migrating, and storing data for applications and users. A key component of the Brocade data center is Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM), a unified fabric management software platform. Brocade DCFM builds upon the recognized capabilities of Brocade's existing fabric management software, Brocade Enterprise Fabric Connectivity Manager (EFCM) and Brocade Fabric Manager.

With the growing value of data as a strategic corporate asset, today's IT organizations face the challenge of implementing reliable backup and recovery solutions in the most efficient, cost-effective manner. To meet this challenge, they need to carefully define their business requirements and recovery objectives before deciding on the right backup and recovery technologies to deploy.

For several years, Fibre Channel networks have been providing organizations with exceptional reliability, performance, and network intelligence for low-latency, high-bandwidth Storage Area Network (SAN) applications. Now, organizations are looking to leverage a new lossless and deterministic transport—Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE)— that enables them to consolidate Fibre Channel SANs and networking transport layers into a single physical interconnect.

A combination of factors is making data center relocation much more common today than it has ever been. Building a mirrored facility for disaster recovery and business continuance purposes is still a major reason for a relocation, but increasingly, factors such as the cost of electricity, real estate values, and the availability of a skilled or less expensive labor pool come into play.

The business environment is complex and highly dynamic. It requires an IT infrastructure that is agile and can act in sync with the fast-moving business environment. To meet this requirement, IT organisations are transforming the model of the data centre from one that is a static and dedicated resource, to one that is a highly dynamic and shared resource. Technologies such as virtualisation and automation are enabling this transformation. Delivering the right services at the right times is only part of the challenge. IT must deliver them at agreed-upon service levels, in a cost-effective manner, while maintaining compliance with internal policies and external regulations. To meet the challenge, IT organisations must take a new approach to managing the complex and highly dynamic data centre.

Electricity usage costs have become an increasing fraction of the total cost of ownership (TCO) for data centres. It is possible to dramatically reduce the electrical consumption of typical data centres through appropriate design of the network-critical physical infrastructure and through the design of the IT architecture. This APC white paper explains how to quantify the electricity savings and provides examples of methods that can greatly reduce electrical power consumption.

A data centre migration (DCM) entails the relocation of a data centre — either a local, regional or national centrer or the relocation of a company's entire IT operation — to a new and almost always larger facility. A data centre migration is major surgery. So please be patient [sorry] with us as we outline when and why it makes sense to go under the DCM knife and which providers might have the requisite bedside manner to help you pull through successfully.

New breakthroughs in power and cooling technology allow for a simple and rapid deployment of self-contained high density zones within an existing or new low density data centre. The independence of these high density zones allows for predictable and reliable operation of high density equipment without a negative impact on the performance of existing low density power and cooling infrastructure. A side benefit is that these high density zones operate at much higher electrical efficiency than conventional designs. Guidance on planning design, implementation, and predictable operation of high density zones is provided.