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HP StorageWorks B-series Multi-Protocol Router Blade -
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HP StorageWorks B-Series Multi-Protocol Router Blade

Business Value

HP Routers enable organizations to derive more value from the SAN infrastructure by extending its reach across disparate SANs and geographical distances, without the risk and downtime of merging them into a single large fabric.
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Overview

For many organizations, the storage infrastructure has evolved into a set of multiple disconnected SAN islands increasing complexity and costs. The HP StorageWorks B-series Multi-Protocol Router Blade enables organizations to derive more value from the SAN infrastructure by providing the ability to connect SAN islands and share resources. This is done without the risk and complexity of merging them into a single large fabric, both for FCIP and native Fibre Channel connectivity. The resulting modular SAN design provides a more scalable, flexible and stable infrastructure that is not limited by distance, maximizing the business value of the SAN infrastructure.

By being an option for the industry leading HP StorageWorks 4/256 SAN Director, the HP MPR blade is able to provide these SAN services with the performance and high-availability characteristics of the director platform. The HP MPR Blade provides two types of SAN Services: (1) FC-FC Subnet Routing Service for SAN island consolidation and (2) FCIP Tunneling Service for SAN extension over distance. These services provide new options for connecting SAN islands and extending SAN benefits over multiple networks, to larger SAN sizes, and across longer distances. Key advantages of this approach include:

Simplifying SAN design, implementation, and management through centralization, providing a seamless and secure way to share resources across multiple SANs without the complexity of physically merging those SANs, creating a more unified SAN environment with easier interconnection and support for SANs and SAN resources purchased from different storage vendors, reducing disruptions created by events such as data migration, storage or server consolidation, migration to production environments, and application rebalancing between fabrics, Extending those benefits over long distances with high performance FCIP services.

What's new

Factory integration or Configure To Order support (CTO) has been added to HP B-series Multi-Protocol Router Blade Exchange Failover Utility.

Features and Benefits

Value: Reduces the cost and effort of SAN design, implementation and management - Many organizations have implemented multiple SAN islands increasing costs and complexity. With the HP MPR blade users can connect SANs, and share resources for greater asset utilization, improved operational flexibility, and more effective management of the SAN environment.

Value: Ensures greater utilization of data networks - The HP MPR Blade reduces operational costs by maximizing available throughput of expensive bandwidth. It accomplishes this by using hardware-based compression, providing extensive port buffering capabilities for high latency networks, and providing line rate performance for high quality IP WANs.

Value: Integrated with HP B-series products and management tools for investment protection - The HP MPR Blade offers outstanding investment protection by using the same Fabric OS operating system and centralized management tools as the rest of the HP B-series, minimizing training and administrative costs. The MPR Blade is backwards compatible with the existing B-series devices, simplifying deployment.

Agility: Hierarchical routing architectures for increased SAN scalability - With the FC Routing services of the HP MPR Blade, users can connect SAN islands and share resources. The resulting modular design enables organization to overcome the scalability limits of individual SAN islands and achieve large scalability in the order of 1000’s of ports and devices with outstanding operational stability.

Agility: Maintains fabric isolation for improved operational stability - By enabling SAN connectivity and resource sharing without the need to merge the SANs, the HP MPR Blade maintains fabric isolation, thus securing a stable solution and proper service levels. Combined with FCIP SAN extension services, the router protects the SAN from WAN disturbances further improving operational stability.

Agility: Non-disruptive integration to the SAN environment - During deployment, the router can be added non-disruptively to the SAN environment. Users can integrate SAN islands with current addressing scheme minimizing downtime, risks, and costs. Once installed, MPR Blade supports faster, easier topology changes, enabling organizations to reduce costs, and increase productivity.

Performance: Industry’s leading 4Gbit/sec FC routing services - The HP MPR Blade provides industry leading 4Gbit/sec performance, and is fully compatible with all B-series products. Moreover, it implements the same valuable services as ISL Trunking and Extended Fabrics, to support high traffic environments.

Performance: Optimized FCIP services - For SAN extension over IP WANs, the HP MPR Blade delivers a unique feature set to optimize performance even when faced with challenging IP WAN environments. They include hardware based compression, extensive buffering, 8 FCIP tunnels per Gbit Ethernet port.

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