Building SANs with Brocade Fabric Switches

The Definitive Guide to Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Brocade SANs

As a superior alternative to traditional direct-attached storage models, Storage Area Networks (SANs) have fundamentally changed the way enterprise storage insfrastructure is designed and built. Moreover, SANs have enabled a wide range of new applications and competitive advantages. To explain these benefits, Brocade Communications Systems and Syngress Publishing bring you Building SANs with Brocade Fabric Switches, the first book written by Brocade engineers for designing, building, and maintaining SANs with Brocade switches.

• Master the process of building SANs with Brocade SilkWorm fabric switches: Learn to optimize your storage resources, achieve continuous data access, and gain excellent ROI.
• Determine what topology is best for your SAN: Understand how to consider availability, port count, cost, and scalability when choosing a SAN topology.
• Troubleshoot your SAN as a "virtual cable:" Learn how the "virtual cable" metaphor simplifies troubleshooting.
• Integrate SANs into existing IT environments: View examples of practical SAN designs and applications.
• Understand the Brocade Fabric OS: Learn what Fabric OS commands to use, when to use them, and how to interpret the output
• Identify key installation consideration to accelerate SAN implementation: Implement your SAN correctly the first time.
• Plan for the overall lifecycle of your SAN: Understand the seven phases in a SAN lifecycle, and how to succeed in each one.
• Learn how to portotype and test your SAN: Learn the key areas that should be tested for successful SAN deployment.
• Conduct a sound data collection phase: See why it is vital that the data collection phase be both complete and accurate.

About the Authors

Chris Beauchamp is a Senior SAN Architect for Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. Chris moved to Brocade in 1998 as a Systems Engineer supporting several strategic customers with the application and qualification of Silk Worm fabric switches. His specialties include Sun servers, storage performance analysis and capacity planning, Fibre Channel trace analysis, scripting in various languages, and SAN administration.

Josh Judd is a Senior SAN Architect with Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. In addition to writing technical literature, he provides senior-level strategic support for major OEMs and end-users of Brocade storage network products worldwide. His expertise lies in several UNIX variants, Windows 9x/NT/2k administration, RAID configuration and optimization, storage virtualization and clustering software, and network engineering with many vendors.

Benjamin F. Kuo is a Software Development Manager at TROIKA Networks. Headquartered in Westlake Village, CA, TROIKA Networks is a developer of Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters, dynamic multipathing, and management software for Storage Area Networks. Ben manages development of network management software at TROIKA and is also active as the chair of the HBA API subgroup of the Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA), where he sprearheads efforts to develop interoperable standards in storage networking.