Flash-Ready Performance For Evolving Storage Requirements; Rely On The Network That Delivers Always-On Business Operations - IBM SAN24B-6 Product Manual

Flash-ready performance for evolving storage requirements

Faced with increased competition and the need to deliver differentiated services,
organizations rely on leading technology to help them expand their businesses and grow
revenue. IBM b-type Gen 6 Fibre Channel delivers advanced 32 Gbps performance to
redefine the limits of application performance, and to unleash the full potential of new storage
technologies.
SAN24B-6 combines market-leading Gen 6 throughput and low latency with an affordable
switch form factor, making it ideal for small to midsized businesses. Using this switch,
organizations can build a flash-ready infrastructure that adapts to their expanding business
requirements. Administrators can achieve optimal bandwidth utilization, high availability, and
load balancing by combining up to eight inter-switch links (ISLs) in a 256 Gbps framed-based
trunk. This can be achieved through eight individual 32 Gbps SFP+ ports.
Moreover, exchange-based dynamic path selection (DPS) optimizes fabric-wide performance
and load balancing by automatically routing data to the most efficient, available path in the
fabric. This feature augments ISL Trunking to provide more effective load balancing in certain
configurations.
To realize the full benefits of flash, organizations will need to transition their
high-performance, latency-sensitive workloads to flash-based storage with NVMe. SAN24B-6
is NVMe-ready, allowing organizations to seamlessly integrate IBM b-type Gen 6 Fibre
Channel networks with next-generation NVMe without a disruptive rip and replace. The
simplicity and efficiency of NVMe over Fibre Channel enable significant performance gains for
flash storage. In addition, NVMe enables users to achieve faster application response times
and harness the performance of solid-state drives for better scalability across virtual data
centers with flash. Leveraging the efficiency of NVMe over Fibre Channel, combined with the
high performance and low latency of IBM b-type Gen 6 Fibre Channel, organizations can
accelerate input/output operations per second (IOPS) to deliver the performance, application
response time, and scalability needed for next-generation data centers (Figure 2).
8.5 Gbps
Up to
256 Gbps
Figure 2 DPS augments ISL Trunking to route data efficiently between multiple trunk groups

Rely on the network that delivers always-on business operations

IBM b-type Gen 5 and Gen 6 technologies leverage a rich heritage of Fibre Channel
innovation to deliver industry-leading reliability for the world's most demanding data centers.
IBM b-type Fabric Vision technology provides a breakthrough hardware and software solution
that helps organizations simplify monitoring, maximize network availability, and gain insight
into issues to speed resolution and meet critical service level agreements (SLAs).
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