Marketplace Trends in Connectivity Products

Storage area networks (SANs) are commonly used in the enterprise data center to facilitate the management of huge amounts of data that companies must store, protect and share. SANs offer several benefits that allow companies to maximize their disk utilization over the direct-attached storage solution.

In a direct-attach storage environment, the data is accessible only when it is directly attached to the server. In a SAN, multiple servers and storage devices are interconnected allowing several users to access and share the data that is being stored. In short, a SAN is more flexible and significantly scalable.

The predominant interface to build out a SAN is Fibre Channel for open systems environments and FICON for the mainframe environment. The switches and directors used to connect the SAN environment (whether Fibre Channel or FICON) are now readily available in the used and refurbished marketplace. In addition, even though the manufacturers of switches have consolidated down to a few (i.e. Brocade bought McData), primarily Cisco and Brocade, hardware resellers typically have both current models and older - no longer manufactured - models available in inventory. The refurbished marketplace can be a great resource for developing SAN environments or supporting existing environments that use older equipment.

Current switches and directors offered by Brocade (and McData products from Brocade), IBM and Cisco can achieve speeds of throughput from 1Gpbs, 2Gbps, 4Gbps and up to 10Gbps for ISL. However, customers' existing SAN and I/O devices that connect to these directors often lag behind at the higher speeds available. Fortunately, all directors that support the high-speed throughput can also auto-sense down to the lower throughput speeds - 1GB or 2GB. The user is able seamlessly add current storage and I/O that have faster throughput while keeping existing hardware attached to the new director or switch. This capability is also a great asset when consolidating smaller switches (16, 32, 64-port capability) onto a larger, single-footprint director that can support up to 384 4GB ports in a single domain or 1,152 4GB ports in a rack.

While companies seek faster throughput, greater security and performance from their switching and director network directly from the manufacturer, a growing community of hardware resellers are able to offer reliable throughput solutions that make financial sense. A few resellers keep a strong inventory of 2Gbps and 4Gbps hardware to support new footprints and port upgrades for all makes and models of the users' switch and director infrastructure.