Brocade and EMC have unveiled the industry’s first dedicated IP storage switch. The fabric networking vendor added its VCS Ethernet fabric solutions to EMC’s Connectrix family of network switches in order to create the VDX-6740B.
Justifying the need for a dedicated IP storage network, Yarob Sakhnini, Regional Director, MEMA at Brocade said, “While the potential cost savings of consolidation may seem enticing, a number of issues can arise that outweigh any potential benefits.
This is especially true in today’s environment where New IP applications and workloads require the most effective and reliable support. While business and technical objectives may call for improved management, performance, failure containment, security, or control, the need is for organisations to have tight coupling of the application, compute, storage, and network.”
This claim is supported in a white-paper by the Enterprise Strategy Group titled The Evolution of IP Storage and Its Impact on the Network in which it is highlighted that by ‘isolating the storage network, high-traffic non-storage events that could impact mission-critical workloads can be eliminated, providing more predictability for workload bandwidth, along with higher performance and availability.’
Researchers from IDC have also advised that organisations consider dedicated networks for IP-based storage as a better approach to align their networking infrastructures with business needs.
The EMC Connectrix VDX-6740B is a high performance, low latency IP storage switch that provides connectivity for a broad array of EMC high-end and mid-range NAS and iSCSI storage platforms. Among its most notable features are patented load-balanced, multi-pathing; on-chip buffers with enhanced throughput; and storage-class resiliency with millisecond link failover allowing I/O to maintain performance despite path or link failure.
“Today’s IP storage workloads can benefit from a dedicated IP storage network which establishes the same performance, predictability, availability and operational simplicity that we have been delivering to our Fibre Channel customers for the past 15-plus years,” Jonathan Siegal, vice president of marketing for EMC’s Core Technologies Division, said in a statement.
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