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| Image: Demartek |
Overview
Fibre Channel is the only trusted purposely built and widely proven network for infrastructure storage that requires non-stop availability, all-out performance, and absolute scalability that universally connects businesses to their overly critical applications and data, and for itself plays a vital role in the world’s financial systems. Throughout the evolution, Fibre Channel has been at the forefront of every single rise of storage improvement in the data center. And at the center of that evolution is Brocade, which has helped more customers deliver more value from the applications and infrastructure by propelling Fibre Channel innovation.
The Main Factor for Success
The next-generation Fibre Channel is the Sixth Generation
(Gen 6) Fibre Channel devised to deliver performance, scalability, and
reliability requirements for hyper-scale virtualization, new data center
architectures, and SSD storage technology. Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel brings
together ground-breaking hardware, software, and integrated network sensors,
guaranteeing the industry’s maximum level of operational stability and
redefining application performance. With Brocade Fabric Vision technology,
Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel is the network innovation required for the
virtualized, all-flash data center. The Brocade Fabric Vision technology
improves visibility into the healthiness of storage environments, providing
greater control and insight to swiftly pinpoint problems and accomplish
critical Service Level Agreements (SLAs). Finally, innovation for the storage
system is well on track.
A key factor for success in any IT enterprise is to take
advantage of new technologies and embrace digital technology transformation
such as flash and next-gen NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express) over fabrics.
However, gaining the maximum benefit from these investments requires
modernizing the storage network.
The Need to Modernize Data Center
Confronted with the exponential growth in data, evolving
workloads, hyper-scale virtualization, and fresh demands for always-on business
operations, the IT storage infrastructure must evolve to enable businesses to
flourish in this modern era. Business leaders are accepting digital
transformation as an essential element for success, expecting that IT would
help them innovate much faster, boost profitability, and gain a competitive
advantage. However, digital transformation also put new pressures on IT
organizations driving mission-critical IT storage environments to the limit.
Legacy infrastructure was purely not designed to support these dynamics and the
present rate of progress in business requirements. IT necessitates
modernization of the data center and setting up a storage infrastructure that
could provide greater consistency, performance, and predictability.
The latest cutting-edge and most electrifying storage
innovation at present is flash-based storage. The flash-based products are
spectacularly fast-tracking data center transformation due primarily to the
exceptional speed and the swiftly increasing cost-effectiveness of these
products. In the future, next-gen flash storage based on NVMe (Non-Volatile
Memory Express) over Fabrics would provide much more value through meaningful
performance gains. As businesses redefine application performance with flash
storage, they do require networks that provide extremely low latency,
greater-capacity bandwidth, and superior dependability. And to take full
advantage of flash-based storage, storage network innovation is also required.
The older network will bottleneck the performance of an all-flash data center.
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| Flash storage demands maximum network speed and throughput | Source: https://community.brocade.com/ |
By leveraging Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel, establishments
can streamline their networks and boost up virtualized applications to take
full advantage of the maximum capabilities of a future-ready all-flash data
center. Additionally, with a variety of deployment possibilities and
future-proof integration, companies can impeccably adapt, transform, and
optimize their business to meet the next-generation storage requirements based
on NVMe over Fabrics. Breakthrough 32 Gbps performance fast-tracks application
reaction time by up to 71 percent, thus removing IO bottlenecks and letting
loose the maximum performance of flash and next-gen NVMe-based storage.
Virtualized All-Flash Data Center Network Innovation
The flash-based storage system is exponentially driving
advances in storage, allowing quicker block-based and file-based storage
performance for high-density virtualized workloads and traditional
mission-critical applications, causing many businesses to move to an all-flash
environment thus eliminating performance and scalability issues. However, this
move pushes the need for higher IO bandwidth performance and more availability
from the storage network.
New server and storage technology innovations like
flash-based storage are pushing up storage network bandwidth requirements well
beyond existing capabilities. Furthermore, the requirements for higher-density
server virtualization, mixed/dynamic workloads, new latency-sensitive
applications, and overall application development each placed unheard-of
demands on the network. It is simple to comprehend the most apparent benefits
of the modernization of networking technology to increase the speed of data
transfers and decrease the number of links and devices that are required to accomplish
network tasks, yet the pressing question often arises whether this higher-level
of infrastructure performance and throughput are necessary to an organization’s
network.
Demartek evaluation testing shows that even when using
an all-flash array with 8 Gbps target ports, considerable enhancements in
application performance could be accomplished by upgrading the network to 32
Gbps with Gen 6 Fibre Channel - without necessitating any alterations to the
target storage system. In the testing done, the completion time was a full 71%
less with Gen 6 Fibre channel compared to a legacy 8 Gbps network, facilitating
a faster decision-making process and proffering significant business worth.
Although the breakthrough in the application performance and throughput
provided by Gen 6 Fibre Channel is necessary and required to meet these
performance requirements and leverage the new flash storage capabilities, it is
additionally important to address the need for greater availability and
predictability from the storage network.
Such requirements had been addressed by Brocade Gen 6 Fibre
Channel by moving further than performance to offer a diversity of unique
innovations delivered through the Gen 6 Fibre Channel Application- ASIC
(Specific Integrated Circuit), combining Brocade Fabric OS® (Brocade FOS) and
Brocade Network Advisor. Altogether, these new competencies boost operational
stability and increase business suppleness, giving the mission-critical
foundation the required support to “always-on” business operations and to
impeccably integrate next-generation storage.
Why Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel for All-Flash?
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| Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel for All-Flash | Source: https://wwpi.com |
Albeit the storage connectivity speed is less than the
maximum network throughput, benchmark testing with factitious workloads shows
that faster network speeds improve the overall ability of flash storage to
maximize input/output operations per second (IOPS). Getting the maximum worth
out of the low-latency, high-throughput designs of an all-flash and flash-enhanced hybrid storage, admins need both high-speed
connectivity and consistent performance via highly deterministic data delivery.
For example, the integration of a flash array with an 8 Gbps Fibre Channel
connectivity into a Gen 6 storage fabric with 32 Gbps connectivity to servers,
allows up to four times more queries to be completed in the same amount of time.
The gradual gains achieved by flash storage will eventually boost the
application reaction time, the efficiency of the IT infrastructure, and the
overall return on storage investment. Furthermore, Gen 6 connectivity provides
on average a 50% reduction in application response times compared to 16 Gbps
storage networks and HBAs (Host Bus Adapters) and a 71% reduction over 8 Gbps
networks and HBAs.
For workloads, for example, OLTP (Online Transaction
Processing), this upsurge in performance turns into a step up in the number of
transactions executed and an increase in income generation for the
organization. From this viewpoint, a small gradual investment in an optimized
server and network infrastructure allows full use of the array performance,
bringing real growth in ROI from capital outlays. As the necessity to scale the
storage ecological get bigger and more flash storage is added into the
ecosystem with much faster connectivity speeds, Gen 6 networks could support
storage expansion without turning into a bottleneck to application performance.
Moreover, Fibre Channel fabrics guarantee a very dependable
network with deterministic data delivery, a particularly important attribute
for guaranteeing regularity of data transfer with foreseeable performance under
the usual usage, in addition to offering fast throughput speeds. As the system
speeds increase, preventing the Fibre Channel frame re-transmission re-tries
because of bit errors becomes critical to meet the Fibre Channel standard for
bit error rates and to keep up optimum performance levels.
The adoption of FEC (Forward Error Correction) pioneered
by Brocade in Gen 5 Fibre Channel enhanced link
reliability. In the Gen 6 standard, FEC forms the integral component in
sustaining 32 Gbps throughput with OM4 (Optical Mode 4) cable. At higher data
transfer speeds, this ability to correct bit errors without disposing of the
frame is essential for keeping up or accomplishing the dependability of
transmission, specifically by older cables or longer links, and practically
removes the need for performance-disrupting IO retransmissions. This regularity
of response time enables application administrators and storage vendors to optimize
their tuning of response times further correctly for workloads, resulting in
faster performance levels and better value from the flash-enhanced array.
The Unique Innovation of Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel
The Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel with its incomparable
bandwidth, performance, and speed is not enough on its own to meet the demands
of customers managing mission-critical IT infrastructure. The drivers at the
heels of the bandwidth and performance gains, such as the high-density virtualization and the flash-based
storage provided by Gen 6 Fibre Channel, require that they are easily deployed
and consistently operated – with a low operating expense (OpEx). The capacity
to simplify management, provide profound and granular perceptibility into
storage performance, speed up troubleshooting, and empower performance
optimization are the things indispensable to ensuring operational regularity
and stability for any large-scale environment.
Enhancing operational stability and increasing business
agility, Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel provides many advanced technologies that
go far beyond throughput performance. Brocade Fabric Vision technology provides
exceptional visibility and insight throughout the storage network, all through
all-powerful monitoring, diagnostic, and management tools that significantly
boost uptime, optimize performance, and lessen expenditures. Brocade Fabric
Vision technology, which is new to Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel, now includes
the Brocade IO Insight capability.
By taking the initiative of monitoring IO performance and
behavior across integrated network sensors, Brocade IO Insight extends Brocade Fabric Vision
technology, providing deep insight into storage performance problems and
helping to ensure service levels. This capability non-disruptively and
non-intrusively bring together IO data from every device port, providing for a
monitoring strategy that quantifies thresholds and generates alerts. The
integrated network sensors of IO Insight provide IO performance management that
is designed to prevent reliance on intrusive and disruptive physical taps. The
application of integrated and device level IO latency and the IOPS monitoring
provide the capability to a baseline application performance and identify
degraded performance.
Conclusion
Not only mean to support niche applications but as well for
assorted workloads that comprise production and business-critical applications,
data centers are recognizing the value proposition for all-flash and flash-enhanced
storage. Modernization of data centers starts with Gen 6 Fibre Channel, but
modern networks for the all-flash data center need more than just higher
throughput and lower latency. Innovations from Brocade such as the Brocade
Fabric Vision technology with IO Insight guarantee a consistent, predictable,
and greatly scalable foundation that businesses could use to optimize their
business and seamlessly acclimate to meet next-generation requirements for
storage-based on NVMe over Fabrics. The Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel brings
the improved operational stability and boosted business agility needed to
prosper in the new modern data center. Today, IT companies leveraging Brocade
Gen 6 Fibre Channel can ensure that their storage networks are adaptable and
future-ready, optimizing virtualized applications and unlocking the full
capabilities of the all-flash data center both today and in the future.
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References:
1. Networkworld | Brocade Gen6
Fibre Channel prepares businesses for an all-flash world
2. Hewlett Packard Enterprise
| Data center
modernization with HPE Gen6 Fibre Channel Networking
3. Hewlett Packard
Enterprise | Get the most out
of the all-flash data center with HPE Gen6 Fibre Channel