Items Tagged: Ethernet

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Fibre Channel: The Proven and Reliable Workhorse for Enterprise Storage Networks

Mission-critical assets such as virtualized and database applications demand a proven enterprise storage protocol to meet their performance and reliability needs. Fibre Channel has long filled that need for most customers, and for good reason. Unlike competing protocols, Fibre Channel was specifically designed for storage networking, and engineered to deliver high levels of reliability and availability as well as consistent and predictable performance for enterprise applications. As a result, Fibre Channel has been the most widely used enterprise protocol for many years.

But with the widespread deployment of 10GbE technology, some customers have explored the use of other block protocols, such as iSCSI and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), or file protocols such as NAS. Others have looked to Infiniband, which is now being touted as a storage networking solution. In marketing the strengths of these protocols, vendors often promote feeds and speeds, such as raw line rates, as a key advantage for storage networking. However, as we’ll see, there is much more to storage networking than raw speed.

It turns out that on an enterprise buyer’s scorecard, raw speed doesn’t even make the cut as an evaluation criteria. Instead, decision makers focus on factors such as a solution’s demonstrated reliability, latency, and track record in supporting Tier 1 applications. When it comes to these requirements, no other protocol can measure up to the inherent strengths of Fibre Channel in enterprise storage environments.

Despite its long, successful track record, Fibre Channel does not always get the attention and visibility that other protocols receive. While it may not be winning the media wars, Fibre Channel offers customers a clear and compelling value proposition as a storage networking solution. Looking ahead, Fibre Channel also presents an enticing technology roadmap, even as it continues to meet the storage needs of today’s most critical business applications.

In this paper, we’ll begin by looking at the key requirements customers should look for in a commercial storage protocol. We’ll then examine the technology capabilities and advantages of Fibre Channel relative to other protocols, and discuss how those translate to business benefits. Since not all vendor implementations are created equal, we’ll call out the solution set of one vendor – QLogic – as we discuss each of the requirements, highlighting it as an example of a Fibre Channel offering that goes well beyond the norm.

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HPE 3PAR Enables Highly Resilient All-Flash Data Centers: Latest Release Solidifies AFA Leadership

If you are an existing customer of HPE 3PAR, this latest release of 3PAR capabilities will leave you smiling. If you are looking for an All Flash Array (AFA) to transform your data center, now might be the time to take a closer at HPE 3PAR. Since AFAs first emerged on the scene at the turn of this decade, the products have gone through various waves of innovation to achieve the market acceptance it has today. In the first wave, it was all about raw performance for niche applications. In the second wave, it was about making flash more cost effective versus traditional disk-based arrays to broaden economic appeal. Now in the final wave, it is about giving these arrays all the enterprise features and ecosystem support to completely replace all legacy Tier 0/1 arrays still in production today. 

HPE 3PAR StoreServ is one of the leading AFAs on the market today. HPE 3PAR uses a modern architectural design that includes multi-controller scalability, a highly-virtualized data layer with three levels of abstraction, system-wide striping, a highly-specialized ASIC and numerous flash innovations. HPE 3PAR engineers pioneered this very efficient architecture well before flash technology became mainstream and proved that this architecture approach has been timeless by demonstrating a seamless transition to support all-flash technology. During this same time, other vendors ran into architectural controller-bound bottlenecks for flash, making them reinvent existing products or completely start from scratch with new architectures. 

HPE’s 3PAR timeless architecture has meant that features introduced years before are still relevant today and features introduced today are available to current 3PAR customers that purchased arrays previously. This continuous innovation of features available to old and new customers alike provides the ultimate in investment protection unmatched by most vendors in the industry today. In this Technology Brief, Taneja Group will explore some of the latest developments from HPE that build upon the rich feature set that already exists in the 3PAR architecture. These new features and simplicity enhancements will show that HPE continues to put customer’s investment protection first and continues to expand its capabilities around enterprise-grade business continuity and resilience. The combination of economic value of HPE 3PAR AFAs with years of proven mission critical features promises to accelerate the final wave of the much-anticipated All-Flash Data Center for Tier 0/1 workloads.