An explosion of new applications and unfunded government mandates continues to drive the need for large amounts of data storage. Each storage application requires a data center with a robust network that can support the network-intensive and bandwidth-hungry applications throughout the enterprise. However, as applications drive data, and data drives storage and bandwidth requirements to new levels, network costs and complexities rise as well. In today's fast-changing but cost-conscious business world, enterprises simply must improve the capabilities, utilization and efficiency of their storage and network assets. This improvement can be done by consolidating or virtualizing your storage resources, while increasing your ROI.

Challenges

Most data storage needs have grown so quickly, it's been impossible to adequately plan a systematic, scalable approach to this problem. The result has been ad hoc growth across all sites, leading to capacity exhaust in some locations and gross underutilization in others. Servers, disks and tape drives have been replicated in multiple data centers, along with the staff to run them. Storage management is, in fact, more costly than the hardware and software combined—as much as three times more costly in many enterprises.

Solution

Utilizing a high-performance, low-latency fiber optic network, your organization can either consolidate storage assets in fewer locations or virtualize distributed storage arrays to create pools of shared capacity. In either case, the end result is a faster, less costly storage solution that improves data access resource utilization—all to the benefit of your business.

Ciena's offerings

Storage extension solutions from Ciena provide the high throughput and low latency required to support both centralized and virtualized storage architectures. Ciena solutions support a wide range of WAN connectivity options from DS-3 to 10 Gb/s running between sites, enabling user connections to storage devices hundreds of miles away with no decrease in performance. Our SONET/SDH solutions provide high reliability, better security through isolation, and the lowest latency for storage extension applications.

Benefits

• Better optimization of free space on storage disks
• Reduce management and maintenance complexities with less hardware to manage
• Reduce space and power requirements versus typical optical deployments
• Consolidate multiple server sites and reduce the cost and complexity of your network