DATA CENTER Building a Reliable Foundation for Expanded Data Center Virtualization

WHITE PAPER

IT organizations can leverage the Brocade DCF architecture and a wide range of strategic solutions and services to achieve their growing virtualization objectives.

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In an effort to meet the growth challenges associated with global expansion and distributed business environments, IT organizations are embracing server and storage virtualization to support business strategies that are more fluid, more cost-effective, and better able to support a dynamic workforce. As they do so, however, many organizations are finding that a more holistic data center virtualization strategy is necessary to meet the management, scalability, and reliability issues related to virtualization deployments.

The Brocade® Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture provides a strategic foundation for transforming today’s IT infrastructures into next-generation, virtualization-enabled data centers. This architecture allows organizations to manage a growing and dynamic IT environment from the perspective of the application stack—leveraging built-in fabric intelligence and a scalable, open architecture to support reliable, flexible, and cost-efficient data access and delivery.

This white paper includes:

Virtualization trends and the issues IT organizations face• A holistic Brocade data center virtualization strategy• The specific Brocade products, solutions, and services that • enable data center virtualization

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CHALLENGES FACING TODAY’S IT ORGANIZATIONSToday business environments are more global, more local, and more complex than ever before. This new global competition requires business strategies that are more fluid, transparent, and dynamic as the supply chain becomes more flexible and regional variations in products and processes are required to gain a competitive advantage (see Figure 1).

Given this new reality, organizations no longer see data centers as simply repositories of corporate data. Instead, they are increasingly turning their data centers into strategic assets in order to keep up with the unprecedented growth of digital data and the pressure to improve infrastructure performance, application availability, and scalability. In the past, users had one device to access applications, which sat on a dedicated server and leveraged data stored on the same storage devices throughout its lifecycle. In turn, the connections between subsystems remained static—a “wire once” data center fabric architecture. However, with virtualization and the increased mobility of applications, data, and users, organizations are discovering that their growing IT infrastructures need to be managed from the perspective of the application—rather than from the device.

In addition to growth and complexity, organizations are attempting to meet growing capacity and performance requirements from virtual infrastructures. They require a flexible, open IT infrastructure that can grow to meet business needs at a reasonable price point, calling for a deliberate and intelligent growth plan that accounts for both long-term and short-term needs.

Simplifying management through resource consolidation is another common goal, helping to reduce the physical number of devices and network infrastructure that need to be monitored and maintained. This consolidation in turn can lower power usage, mitigating the data center contribution to climate change while lowering monthly electricity bills. Finally, organizations need a data center infrastructure in place that is manageable, scalable, and reliable, giving the organization the flexibility it needs to seamlessly allocate, monitor, and manage resources.

To address these challenges, organizations are making strategic, future-looking, and low-risk infrastructure investments that provide a fast Return On Investment (ROI) and contribute to a flexible and dynamic business model. With this mandate to reduce risk and complexity, organizations need infrastructure components that are more tightly integrated under a common management framework. Only then will organizations begin to leverage a powerful and dynamic data center infrastructure as a strategic advantage.

Figure 1. The key drivers of virtualization investments from a CIO Magazine survey of 300 CIOs, Source: CIO Magazine, January 2008

Server consolidation 81%

Disaster recovery and backup 63%

Better provisioning of computer resources 55%

More flexibility for the business 53%

Competitive advantage 13%

Source: CIO Magazine, January 2008

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VIRTUALIZATION TODAYVirtualization solutions are present throughout the data center, increasing mobility through the data center fabric and changing the way organizations deliver applications to users. Organizations can now build scalable, manageable, and reliable server and storage environments that respond intelligently and quickly to changing market demands while cutting capital expenditures and operational costs.

Today’s virtualization solutions consist of pools of flexible server and storage resources that can be allocated dynamically to meet variable traffic loads and changing business needs. While traditional IT management strategies focused on monitoring and managing hardware components, virtualization allows organizations to concentrate on the application stack, ensuring that users have access to the tools and information they need, when they need it.

Organizations are using server virtualization solutions to build on-demand compute environments that can dynamically allocate server resources between business applications. For example, a Wall Street firm now has the technology to allocate additional systems to the company’s trading application during market hours and then repurpose those servers after the bell rings to other applications—such as accounting, Web serving, and support functions. Instead of purchasing multiple static systems to perform multiple jobs some of the time, fewer servers are deployed and more fully optimized. While server virtualization provides utilization and performance benefits, organizations can go one step further by extending virtualization to the application access network and the application data fabric.

Server- and storage-centric solutions do not go far enough in enabling complete data center resource allocation. They simply cannot provide a holistic solution to virtualize the network and the fabrics that tie these environments together while extending adaptive networking services to the rest of the data center. Because multiple workloads are now supported on a single physical server, bandwidth throughout the data center fabric and I/O have much more impact on application performance than previous static architectures. It is important that these fabrics are as flexible and dynamic as the compute and storage environments they support. Otherwise, performance problems can create bottlenecks that inhibit an organization’s ability to quickly deliver applications and data to users at a low cost and at constant availability.

In addition, it is usually expensive to rip and replace static infrastructure with more flexible solutions. IT organizations have found that virtual environments can be inherently complex and require extensive planning, configuration, and management to maintain aggressive Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and ensure Quality of Service (QoS) levels. With IT staff already overburdened with infrastructure management, organizations need better tools and additional resources to enable a holistic data center virtualization solution.

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THE BROCADE VIRTUALIZATION STRATEGY: THE BROCADE DCF ARCHITECTUREThe Brocade Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture provides a strategic foundation for transforming today’s IT infrastructures into next-generation data centers with reduced costs, increased flexibility, and minimized risk. This evolutionary strategy allows organizations to leverage a variety of basic building blocks for implementing a holistic data center virtualization solution that provides a true end-to-end strategy for deploying flexible, simple, and cost-efficient infrastructure.

With more than a decade of experience and a wide breadth of data center solutions, Brocade helps organizations utilize Brocade Adaptive Networking services across the data center as part of a complete, holistic virtualization strategy. Brocade works with a broad range of industry-leading storage, server, software, and networking vendors and is committed to extensive compatibility testing that results in best-in-class virtualization solutions.

Through the strategic Brocade DCF architecture, Brocade provides the “enabling” layer for data center virtualization—building the intelligence required in virtual environments directly into the data center fabric. This intelligence includes multiprotocol connectivity as well as fabric, application, and extension services. In addition, Brocade works with its partners (through their management applications) to provide unified management across the data center and beyond, giving IT organizations the visibility and control to efficiently deploy and manage their virtual resources.

Figure 2. The Brocade DCF architecture: a robust foundation with advanced services to enable data center virtualization.

• Fabric QoS• Application QoS• Traffic Management• Fabric Dynamic Profiling• Resource recovery

• FSPF• Topology discovery• Zoning• Trunking• Security

Adaptive Networkingservices

Brocade fabricintelligence

Fabric services

Fabric protocols • FCP• SAN routing• FCIP• iSCSI• FCoE

• Virtual Fabrics• Virtual Channels• Congestion monitors• Resource monitors• Queue management• Congestion prediction

Physical Connectivity• Backbones• Directors• Switches• Blade server switches• SAN routers• FICON extension• Open systems extension• HBAs

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In particular, the Brocade DCF architecture leverages built-in fabric intelligence and policy-driven automation to support existing server and storage virtualization deployments, dynamically meeting the demands of traffic load across the network (see Figure 2). The architecture supports multiple applications, protocols, and hardware brands, giving organizations the ability to automatically—or dynamically—interchange hardware and infrastructure depending on SLAs and current business needs. Organizations can take advantage of heterogeneous pools of IT resources allocated on demand to meet changing traffic scalability loads.

The Brocade DCF architecture also enables central management capabilities throughout the data center, increasing agility while lowering capital expenditures and reducing operational costs. For instance, organizations can access a central management console to plan, deploy, monitor, and manage virtualization solutions and IT resource pools.

Data Center ConnectivityThe Brocade DCX consolidates storage resources into a single pool that can be dynamically allocated, monitored, and managed from a central management console. This approach provides a snapshot of available resources and how they relate to each other. Armed with this critical information and a central management framework, organizations can make fast and accurate decisions based on real-time monitoring and powerful analytics—ensuring that virtualization can be seamlessly implemented and managed from the perspective of the application stack as an end-to-end strategy across the data center.

The Brocade DCX also accommodates a broad range of automation capabilities across the data center fabric, allowing organizations to create advanced policies to support a variety of strategic virtualization initiatives. This simplifies planning, deploying, monitoring, and maintaining a dynamic data center fabric and ensures the visibility and manageability required in a holistic data center virtualization strategy.

Brocade SAN backbones, directors, and switches provide a reliable foundation for connecting virtual servers and storage devices in multiprotocol environments; they are the building blocks for high-performance, high-reliability data center networks. The solutions optimize storage networking infrastructure to address the widest range of requirements in virtualized environments, resulting in the flexibility, scalability, and performance to deploy and manage a holistic virtualized data center.

Brocade data center connectivity solutions offer:

Increased network flexibility and utilization of shared resources for virtualized networks•

Greater flexibility with advanced partitioning and extension technologies•

Adaptive Networking services•

Industry-leading power and cooling efficiency for reduced operational expenses•

The resulting high-speed, robust storage networks enable organizations to access and share virtual data in a high-performance, manageable, and scalable manner. Organizations can deploy 1, 2, 4, and 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel SAN environments with highly scalable core-to-edge configurations optimized for virtual networks.

UNIQUE ADVANTAGES OF THE BROCADE DATA CENTER FABRIC ARCHITECTURE

Is an application- and data-centric • (versus network-centric) foundation, delivering the highest levels of performance, scalability, and reliability

Simplifies data center connectivity • and reduces costs by collapsing storage networking and server-to-server clustering into a single, converged infrastructure

Adapts to the dynamics of • virtualized servers and storage while accommodating expanding application workloads

Provides “plug-in” services that • leverage intelligence in the fabric and offload server resources to increase protection, provide data mobility, virtualize storage, and enhance security

Supports a common management • framework utilizing best-in-class Brocade and third-party tools across block, file, and other data types

Protects and extends existing IT • investments with interoperability for non-disruptive growth and expansion

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The Brocade solutions provide built-in investment protection as key elements of a future-built, flexible, scalable, and multiprotocol framework. Organizations can utilize their existing equipment and processes and choose how and when to upgrade their fabrics to support virtualization in the most efficient manner.

Server ConnectivityVirtual environments require powerful mobility throughout the data center fabric—application performance depending much more on bandwidth and I/O than static network architectures. Brocade server connectivity solutions enable faster and more efficient I/O streams, policy-based QoS, and fabric-based services to support seamless data migration, protection, and encryption. As a result, they enable applications to “move” across virtual environments and the storage fabric without interrupting data access or impacting users.

Brocade Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) lay the foundation for extending fabric intelligence to servers and through the network to virtual machines, applications, and services—enabling end-to-end storage network management. This approach provides tighter integration across the enterprise, including both physical and virtual infrastructure.

Brocade HBAs provide robust and powerful storage connectivity for virtual servers, helping to ensure that flexibility does not come at the price of performance, reliability, or scalability. They also provide up to 8 Gbit/sec performance along with greater data protection for both physical and virtualized environments. The flexible Brocade architecture simplifies management of virtual connections, giving organizations the ability to guarantee service levels, monitor I/O history, and isolate traffic per virtual machine.

Brocade Access Gateway enhances server connectivity to shared storage, bringing a wide variety of scalability, manageability, and cost advantages to virtual environments. The solution enables the direct connection of servers to any shared storage fabric, enhancing fabric scalability by eliminating the switch domain identify. The Brocade Access Gateway also eliminates traditional heterogeneous switch-to-switch interoperability challenges by utilizing N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) standards to present Fibre Channel server connections as logical devices to the data center fabric. Virtual machines can connect quickly and seamlessly to shared storage with minimal configuration.

Brocade supports new Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) protocols, giving organizations the ability to consolidate multiple transport layers on a single physical interconnect. This new transport layer will extend the reliability and fabric services of Fibre Channel to a broader range of server environments, enabling more flexibility throughout the data center fabric and reducing the cost and complexity of implementing a virtualized data center.

The high performance and flexibility provided by Brocade server connectivity help speed the process of provisioning server, I/O, and bandwidth resources for dynamic virtualized environments. This ability to quickly and seamlessly allocate resources is a key component of a holistic data center virtualization strategy. Quickly reacting to changes in traffic load requires the ability to rapidly identify available systems; load them with the appropriate operating system, applications, and drivers; and then allocate storage resources. Brocade server connectivity solutions help ensure that this traditionally complex and time-consuming process is not an inhibitor to virtualization, but rather a strength to help streamline data delivery and simplify management.

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Storage Fabric ExtensionRegardless of the type of network, Brocade extension solutions are designed to reliably connect critical resources throughout the data center and across the enterprise. These solutions include the Brocade 7500 Extension Switch, Brocade 7500E Extension Switch, Brocade FR4-18i SAN Extension Blade (in the Brocade DCX Backbone or Brocade 48000 Director), Brocade USD-X, and Brocade Edge M3000 SAN Router. In virtualized environments, storage fabric extension solutions can help ensure reliable data access—even as the connections between servers and storage become increasingly fluid.

Brocade extension solutions provide robust connectivity between devices, creating the framework for reliable resource pools that can be grouped as a single virtual asset or allocated on demand as needs arise—regardless of where the resources are physically deployed. Organizations can consolidate and share devices without the restrictions of merged fabrics, even in multivendor environments.

This reliable extension of shared storage also enables a more efficient business continuity and disaster recovery strategy—using virtualization as its foundation. Because resource pools can be spread across geographies in multiple data centers, shared storage can act as both an in-production resource—available to be allocated quickly and dynamically whenever and wherever it is needed—and as disaster recovery infrastructure.

Central ManagementAs stated above, virtualization requires the careful management of the application stack rather than hardware components to enable seamless mobility of applications and data throughout the data center fabric. Brocade fabric management software centralizes the management of large, multi-fabric or multi-site storage networks—improving visibility throughout the data center fabric and the virtual connections between servers and storage. With enterprise-class reliability and scalability—and advanced features such as proactive monitoring and alert notification—Brocade management solutions help optimize storage resources in virtual environments and maximize the performance of the data center fabric.

Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM™), Brocade Enterprise Fabric Connectivity Manager (EFCM), and Brocade Fabric Manager provide the essential capabilities to manage Brocade fabrics on a daily basis the framework for planning, deploying, monitoring, and maintaining virtual environments. The management solutions also serve as the access point to fabric intelligence and fabric services for Brocade virtualization management platform partners including VMware, Microsoft, and IBM. It helps mitigate complexity and streamline

Figure 3. The data center of the future featuring a

unified fabric with advanced services.

High Performance CORE DATA

CENTER

Low CostiSCSI SAN

Disaster Recovery Site

Next-generation 10 GbE CEE

FCoE

Fibre Channel Storage I/O

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administrative tasks through automated event management, security policy management, historical analysis, and group event logging. Simplified management throughout the fabric makes it easier to provision storage resources to support server virtualization (see Figure 3).

Brocade management software solutions work in tandem with Brocade data center backbone, director, switch, and extension solutions so organizations can dynamically manage and implement a holistic data center virtualization strategy.

File ManagementAs employees, partners, and customers become increasingly dispersed, files that need to be stored and protected become distributed as well. The Brocade DCF architecture extends beyond the borders of the corporate data center and block-based SAN fabrics to include remote offices and file storage. Brocade file management solutions enable data centers to provide centralized, policy-driven management of files residing at all points of the enterprise, allowing file access to be virtualized and viewed in a manner similar to World-Wide Web (WWW) pages through a technology known as a global (single) namespace.

At the same time, Brocade file management solutions allow organizations to non-disruptively manage files located in remote offices and data centers. Organizations can transparently migrate files from remote offices and consolidate them in a central data center where they can be stored, archived, and backed up more reliably and efficiently. These files can then be migrated seamlessly in the background without disrupting user access.

For example, Brocade StorageX® creates a global namespace as a logical view of files, enabling users to access distributed files without knowing—or caring—where they are stored. Organizations can expand, move, rebalance, and reconfigure file storage in relation to the virtual environment without affecting how users view and access files. This logical management system for distributed files requires far less administrative effort and time, enabling organizations to manage files on heterogeneous, geographically distributed storage devices through a single console.

In addition, Brocade File Management Engine (FME) enables the seamless migration of files across physical distances without disrupting availability. This allows organizations to schedule regular maintenance of file servers during business hours, helping eliminate the need to perform these tasks during nights and weekends.

Together, Brocade file management solutions provide the transparency necessary to optimize virtual environments based on their ability to

Automate non-disruptive migration of file shares and directories•

Classify and place individual files on multiple storage tiers•

Support automated, policy-based tasks•

Simulate and validate policies prior to actual execution•

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Professional ServicesBrocade provides a wide range of assessment, design, and implementation services for virtualized environments, helping organizations implement a holistic data center virtualization strategy. For example, Brocade offers a VMware Server Virtualization Solution Service, which helps organizations virtualize any environment from the corporate data center to branch offices by leveraging shared storage resources. Brocade Professional Services consultants have performed thousands of VMware engagements for Fortune 1000 customers, highlighting the importance of shared storage in a holistic data center virtualization strategy.

Brocade also provides data protection, security, and migration services that enable a comprehensive virtualization strategy. As part of these services, Brocade consultants work with IT organizations to leverage high-performance shared storage for greater manageability, flexibility, and availability for virtualized environments. They also help to ensure that this heterogeneous pool of storage resources is always available—even to the most resource-intensive virtual applications. As a result, Brocade virtualization services help organizations optimize their virtual environments to generate tangible cost savings and ROI.

Brocade provides the following virtualization services:

Server Virtualization Assessment Services•

VMware Infrastructure HealthCheck•

DCF Assessment Services•

Data Center Virtualization Design Services•

Server Implementation Services•

DCF Implementation Services•

Data Center Virtualization Transformation Services•

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CONCLUSIONMany organizations are embracing server and storage virtualization solutions in an effort to cost-effectively connect users to applications and data, consolidate infrastructure, and enable business strategies that are more fluid, transparent, and dynamic. However, to gain the most value, organizations need to go one step further and implement a holistic data center virtualization strategy that extends the benefits of dynamic pools of IT resources to the data center fabric. Only then will they be able to leverage a powerful and dynamic data center infrastructure as a strategic advantage in an increasingly diverse and distributed business environment.

Leveraging a wide range of industry-leading Brocade solutions and services, these organizations can take a holistic approach to virtualization, implementing a powerful management strategy that focuses on the application stack rather than on hardware components. From data center and server connectivity to central management software and file management, Brocade solutions and services provide organizations with a framework in which to fully extend the consolidation, cost, and performance benefits of virtual infrastructures throughout the data center fabric.

To learn more, visit www.brocade.com.

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© 2008 Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 11/08 GA-WP-1220-01

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