IBM Storage Networking SAN256B-6 Gen 6 Director Coming From Brocade

IBM Storage Networking SAN256B-6 delivers network innovation for the virtualized, all-flash data center

Digital transformation is pushing mission-critical storage environments to the limit, with users expecting data to be accessible from anywhere, at any time, and on any device. Faced with exponential data growth, the network must evolve to enable businesses to thrive in this new era.

To meet these dynamic and growing business demands, organizations need to deploy infrastructure that can deliver greater consistency, predictability, and performance. Legacy infrastructures, however, were not designed to support the performance requirements of evolving workloads and flash-based storage technology. In fact, an aging network will impede the performance of an all-flash data center.

A new approach to storage networking is needed to enable databases, virtual servers, desktops, and critical applications, and to unlock the full capabilities of flash. By treating the network as a strategic part of a storage environment, organizations can maximize their productivity and efficiency as they rapidly scale their environments.

IBM Storage Networking SAN256B-6 director with Fabric Vision technology combines hardware, software, and built-in instrumentation to ensure the high level of operational stability while redefining application performance. It delivers a modular building block for increased scalability to accommodate growth for large-scale enterprise infrastructures.

Fabric Vision technology enhances visibility into the health of storage environments, delivering greater control and insight to quickly identify problems and achieve critical SLAs. 32/128Gb/s performance shatters application performance barriers and enables support for more than one billion IO/s for flash-based storage workloads. With diverse deployment options, organizations can smoothly adapt and optimize their businesses to meet next-generation storage requirements.

SAN256B-6 delivers following benefits:

• Enhance operational stability, maximize application performance, and increase business agility with enterprise, b-type Gen 6 directors
• Shatter application performance barriers across 32Gb/s links and support up to 1 billion IO/s without oversubscription
• Consolidate infrastructure with high-density solutions built with 128Gb/s UltraScale ICL connectivity for simpler, flatter, low-latency fabrics
• Simplify end-to-end management of large-scale environments by automating monitoring and diagnostics
• Detect degraded application or device performance automatically with built-in monitoring
• Extend distance and replication with a highly scalable, multiprotocol extension solution
• Integrate next-generation flash storage based on NVMe flash memory with current and future b-type Gen 6 FC networks
• Mitigate risk with backward-compatibility

Key prerequisites
The IBM Storage Networking b-type SAN switch and director family supports FC connectivity for servers and storage. SAN256B-6 (8961-F04) supports all features and functions listed and require Fabric OS level 8.0.1, or later.

Planned availability date: November 11, 2016