Demand for storage capacity is growing rapidly. Keeping up with demand requires solutions that allow you to work smarter—solutions that enable you to scale easily and economically and manage more efficiently—and that provide you with the peace of mind that comes with reliable business continuance operations.

IP-based storage networking promises to simplify the building and cost-effectively deploy of storage networks by allowing them to be built using equipment designed for common IP networks instead of the Fibre Channel technology commonly employed in SANs.

Companies investing in Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SAN) infrastructure have realized significant benefits in increased storage utilization and availability, simplified management, and more effective disaster recovery and business continuance strategies. Until now, however, SAN deployment and its resulting benefits have primarily been focused on mission-critical application islands within individual data centers.

The difficulty and cost associated with migrating the large number of data center midrange servers to Fibre Channel have made it impractical for IT managers to extend the benefits of SAN to mid-range applications. Using open-standard IP-based technology, IP Storage networking eliminates the barriers to SAN expansion, enabling businesses to extend the reach of their Fibre Channel SANs throughout the data center and between data centers. Interconnection of remote SAN islands and extending SAN connectivity to IP-enabled servers are now easily supported.

The idea behind running an network attached IP storage network, over an Ethernet LAN is that companies without the experience and budget for Fibre Channel can build new storage networks on more familiar Ethernet networks already in place. And with IP, they can extend existing storage networks outside the data center over more common IP links.

The nature of the storage environment has changed radically in the last few years. It is it now characterized by unprecedented growth in the volume of data to be managed and a quantum leap in complexity and the sheer number of available combinations and permutations. Add to that the growing value of data to the enterprise, and the overwhelming importance of storage and storage networking becomes obvious.