Investment protection with 64G FC readiness using HPE C-series Fibre Channel Director Switch

[StorageExperts]

Today, many enterprises struggle to keep pace as more and more devices and applications are added to overburdened, outdated infrastructures. With the introduction of artificial intelligence and machine learning, there are literally billions of autonomous devices operating everything, from everywhere around the globe, generating massive amounts of data that has to be collected, transported, and analyzed on a real-time basis. As a result of this rapid data growth, a major challenge for IT is that the value of this data is perishable. – The longer it takes to analyze and use the information, the less powerful it is. This means it is critical for any organization to invest in next generation products to store, transport, process and analyze data faster to extract the true business value for the organization.

HPE has been steadily building on our commitment to help customers connect to today’s modern hybrid or all-flash array devices with connectivity that delivers high IOPS and low latency. By introducing step-wise storage connectivity upgrades, we strive to ensure that our throughput, density and performance characteristics lead in the marketplace.

NEW today! HPE C-series SN8700C FC Director Switch

Continuing in that tradition, we are pleased to announce the introduction of the HPE C-series SN8700C Fibre Channel Director Switch, designed to deliver many unique innovations for constructing powerful, large-scale storage networks. With innovations included in this new switch, users can build highly scalable, always available, high performance storage network solutions with comprehensive security and unified management. The SN8700C currently supports 4/8/16/32 FC, and will support 64Gb FC in the future.

Industry-leading scalability and performance

The HPE SN8700C is a director-class SAN switch designed for deployment in small to medium-sized storage networks, to support enterprise clouds and business transformation. It layers a comprehensive set of intelligent features onto a high-performance, protocol-independent switch fabric. The HPE SN8700C 8-slot and 4-slot FC Director supports 4/8/16/32/64* Gb FC, and delivers industry-leading scalability and performance (up to 24-Tbps front panel FC switching bandwidth), high port density (up to 384-ports in an SN8700C 8-Slot Director) and high availability to lower TCO and enable integrated SAN infrastructures. The open expansion slots of the SN8700C Directors can be filled with HPE C-series Family Modules, which include a 48-port 32Gb FC module and a 48-port FCoE module. It can also easily accommodate a 64Gb FC module, when available.

The HPE SN8700C Director Switch is NVMe ready, and comes with new powerful Supervisor-4 and Fabric-3 modules. The Fabric-3 module provides double the bandwidth compared to the Fabric-1 module and thus only half the number is needed to support currently shipping 32-Gbps line cards. For example, only 3x Fabric-3 modules are required for 32G line cards; 6x Fabric-3 modules will support future 64G line cards. Existing HPE SN8500C customers can buy the new Supervisor-4 and Fabric-3 modules to prepare for future growth into the 64Gb FC. This means that the chassis you buy today is ready to drive the SAN with optimal speed of 64G FC because the back plane will be ready to fly.

The HPE SN8700C Director Switch comes with high availability features inherent in the design. Redundancy is also enabled on all major components, including the fabric card. In addition, the switch offers state-of-the-art SAN analytics and telemetry capabilities that offers end-to-end visibility into the fibre channel block storage traffic.

Takeaways

We all know that data center modernization requires a faster fabric infrastructure. – If the data center is not carefully planned and designed with new technologies and applications in mind, one might end up with a speed mismatch, network congestion and degrading performance. Future-proofing your SAN infrastructure with the new HPE C-series SN8700C solution will give your management team the required performance, deep visibility and investment protection they need, while your IT department benefits from technical and operational efficiency.

The HPE C-series SN8700C Directors are available immediately. Please contact your local HPE account team, or visit the HPE Store online for more information. 

By Prabhu Punniamurthy, Senior Product Manager, Storage Networking at Hewlett Packard Enterprise

Storage Experts
Hewlett Packard Enterprise

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[parnassus]

Hi! not nice to see the image of a Cisco MDS 9710 where it is expected the one of the HPE C-series SN8700C Director Switch.

[CalvinZito]

@parnassus Though we OEM Cisco MDS products, Cisco doesn’t allow us to add HPE bezel/faceplate on the device.  We add HPE product & serial # labels on the device and the outer packaging. Hence we have used the Cisco image on the SN8700C product page because that is what our product looks like too.

[parnassus]

Hi @CalvinZito! yeah you're right...I was just curious of that Cisco image because I saw the HPE bezel/faceplate on the HPE StoreFabric SN8000B 4-slot SAN director switch. The SN8000B belongs to StoreFabric B-series and not to C-series so, probably, different OEM hardware's origins can explain the difference in allowing or not the HPE faceplate. In any case, thanks!