With the exponential growth of data in today’s smarter business environments, organizations must deploy large-scale SANs in the most efficient and cost-effective way possible. To meet scalability requirements while managing total cost of ownership SAN384C-6 offers various capabilities to enable organizations to consolidate their data assets into fewer, larger and more manageable SANs. It helps reduce the data-center hardware footprint and associated capital and operational expenses.

IBM Storage Networking SAN384C-6 shares the same operating system and management interface as other IBM Storage Networking c-type switches, which enables seamless fabric deployment with high-performance Fibre Channel, FICON and FCIP connectivity. The 48-port 32-Gbps Fibre Channel Switching Module delivers high performance and innovative features that empower scalability and intelligence in large, virtualized data-center deployments.

Beyond meeting the basic requirements of non-disruptive software upgrades and redundancy of critical hardware components, IBM Storage Networking c-type family software architecture offers a high level of availability. It provides redundancy on all major hardware components, including supervisor modules, fabric modules, power supplies and fan trays. Additionally, it is designed to maintain near-continuous availability.

SAN384C-6 is designed to provide high scalability and pay-as-you-grow flexibility, robust security for multi-tenancy cloud applications, predictable high performance required to meet strict service level agreements (SLAs), resilient connectivity required for no-downtime cloud infrastructures, and advanced traffic management capabilities—such as quality of service—needed to quickly and cost-efficiently allocate elastic network capabilities to cloud applications.

To meet the needs of any user, SAN384C-6 provides three principal management modes: the IBM Storage Networking c-type family command-line interface (CLI), DCNM and integration with third-party storage-management tools. It leverages the IBM Storage Networking c-type family's easy-to-learn CLI to deliver broad management capabilities. This highly efficient and direct interface is designed to provide consistent, logical, optimal capabilities to administrators in enterprise environments.

Addressing the need for foolproof security in storage networks, the SAN384C-6 and the 48-port 32-Gbps line card offer an extensive security framework to protect the highly sensitive data crossing today’s enterprise networks. It employs intelligent packet inspection at the port level, including the application of access control lists (ACLs) for hardware enforcement of zones, VSANs and advanced port security features.

Managing large-scale storage networks requires proactive diagnostics tools to verify connectivity and route latency, as well as mechanisms to capture and analyze network traffic. SAN384C-6 provides comprehensive port-based and flow-based statistics that enable sophisticated performance analysis and SLA accounting. Plus, an integrated Call Home capability can add reliability, speed problem resolution and help reduce service costs.