The Benefits of 16 Gb Fibre Channel in IBM Flex System Solutions

Ensuring that business-critical data is available when needed is an ever-growing need in IT. Your systems must store massive amounts of data quickly and retrieve it efficiently. Simultaneously, you must use new technologies that can improve efficiency and take advantage of these technologies within limited budgets.

One measure of growing efficiency in recent years is CPU processing power, which far exceeds growth in disk input/output (I/O). For this reason, disk I/O is often the reason for bottlenecks in high-performance applications.

16 Gb Fibre Channel connectivity that is combined with other storage technologies, such as solid-state drives and storage tiering, can help to balance the performance of storage subsystem with the server processing capabilities.

This IBM® Redpaper™ publication describes server performance imbalance that can be found in typical application environments and how to address this issue with the 16 Gb Fibre Channel technology to provide required levels of performance and availability for the storage-intensive applications.

Executive summary
Introduction
Fibre Channel SANs versus converged networks
Benefits of 16 Gb Fibre Channel SANs
IBM Flex System I/O architecture and 16 Gb FC portfolio
Proof-of-concept scenarios
Deployment scenarios of 16 Gb FC host connectivity
Conclusion

Related product families

Product families related to this document are the following:

• Blade Storage Modules
• Embedded SAN Switches