History 2004: 3,000 to 3,500 Brocade Switches at France Telecom

France Telecom is one of Brocade Communications largest customers in Europe with 3,000 to 3,500 FC switch ports for its 5 Parisian IT centers, for a total of 2 to 3PB on disks (mainly on EMC systems), all interconnected by DWDM.

The main application handles call details for billing.

“Of our total IT investment, storage now represents 40 to 50%,” says Jean-Arnauld Gauthun, director of NAS, SAN, DAS at the telcom company, heading up a team of 7 people entirely dedicated to storage.

Storage virtualization was tested 2 years ago, but has not been implemented.

“It went through the central servers, and we prefer to wait for its integration directly into the SAN network,” explained Gauthun.

He also told us that he expected to switch to D2D backup in a few months, but that tape would be maintained for archiving. What he most wants from storage vendors: a single file system between operating systems and all disk drives.

This article is an abstract of news published on issue 201 on October 2004 from the former paper version of Computer Data  Storage Newsletter.