SAN Devices

HPE SAN Director Switch

Today's enterprises are dealing with challenges stemming from unprecedented growth of data, mission critical workloads, ever-increasing VM densities, and getting the most out of investments in new technologies like flash and Non Volatile Memory express (NVMe) storage. With the unprecedented speed and increasing cost-effectiveness of these platforms, data centers are rapidly transforming and are required todeliver more scale, higher availability, and better reliability. In order to meet these challenges, the storage network has become more important and must provide greater value through performance, reliability, and automation of common tasks than ever before.

As a building block of modern data centers, HPE B-series Fibre Channel SAN Director Switches are the industry's leading SAN infrastructure solution for optimizing storage, simplifying operations, and automating SAN management tasks. With industry-leading low latency, increased bandwidth, and continuous availability organizations can have reliable access to data and applications while ensuring modern workloads run smoothly.

A modern SAN must also be self-learning, self-healing, and self-optimizing, with advanced analytics for real-time actionable insights. B-series Fibre Channel SAN Director Switches give organizations a faster, more intelligent, more resilient data network that maximizes the performance of server and storage resources as they scale to meet ever-changing business demands. In addition, HPE gives customers peace of mind and investment protection by allowing the upgrade of a Gen6 HPE SN8600B Director to a Gen 7 HPE SN8700B Director via core blade upgrades without costly rip and replace.

A Purpose-Built Extension Platform for Midrange Storage

The HPE B-series SN2600B SAN Extension Switch is a robust platform for medium-scale, multisite data center environments implementing block, file, and tape data protection solutions.

Build a high-performance infrastructure between data centers for multisite asynchronous and synchronous storage replication with centralized tape backup, recovery, and archiving solutions.

By using WAN-optimized TCP, disk and tape protocol acceleration, and data compression, you can increase replication and backup throughput over distance.

This platform is designed to offer both Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) and IP extension technology and can handle simultaneous replication from Fibre Channel and IP storage arrays to consolidate replication workloads over WAN connections.

With twelve 32 Gb/s capable Fibre Channel ports and six 1/10-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports, this switch provides the bandwidth and throughput required for greater application performance over WAN connections.

Cost-Effective, Scalable, and Flexible SAN Extension

With the HPE B-series SN2600B SAN Extension Switch, organizations can quickly and cost-effectively scale their WAN rate from 1 Gb/s to 2.5Gb/s by purchasing a full configuration with 2.5Gb/s WAN capacity, or pay as you grow with an on-demand upgrade license.

The HPE B-series SN2600B SAN Extension Switch base configuration provides four 32Gb/s-capable Fibre Channel ports and six 1/10GbE ports. Two of the Ethernet ports can be utilized as WAN ports with Adaptive Rate Limiting (ARL) and IPsec.

The on-demand upgrade license enables 8 additional Fibre Channel ports, includes 8-16Gb FC short wave optics, enables 4 additional 1/10GbE WAN ports and includes HPE Power Pack+ Software. The software features include: FC Trunking, Extension Trunking, Fabric Vision, FC Routing, Extended Fabrics.

With a compression ratio of 4 to 1, organizations can scale up to 10Gb/s replication throughput, depending on the type of data and the characteristics of the WAN connection.

Simplified Disaster Recovery and Data Protection

The HPE B-series SN2600B SAN Extension Switch supports simple point-to-point, comprehensive multisite SAN extension and remote offices, offering enterprise-class capabilities for a variety of strategic IT initiatives including demanding disaster recovery requirements.

The HPE B-series SN2600B SAN Extension Switch centralizes backup to consolidate infrastructure and administrative resources.

It is designed with built-in tools to verify the condition of WAN links and network paths, and validate the proper setup of configurations prior to deployment.

Powerful Performance

Supporting up to 250 milliseconds Round-Trip Time (RTT) latency, the HPE SN2600B SAN Extension Switch enables cost-effective extension solutions over distances up to 25,500 kilometers (15,845 miles).¹

Leverage TCP Acceleration to help achieve increased replication speeds from storage devices, and WAN-optimized TCP to help ensure in-order, lossless transmission of extension data.

With twelve 32Gbps-capable Fibre Channel ports, six 1/10-Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports, and a 2.5Gb/s WAN tunnel, this switch offers the bandwidth and throughput required for greater application performance.

Key Features

Increase Performance for Application and Solid State Storage Architectures

The HPE B-series SN6600B Fibre Channel Switch delivers increased performance through a combination of improved throughput and low latency across 32Gb and 128Gb links in hyper-scale virtualization, large cloud infrastructures, and growing flash-based storage environments.

The onboard ASIC provides up to 566 million frames switched per second and up to 100 million IOPS to meet the demands of flash-based storage workloads.¹

Port-to-port latency is reduced to 700 nanoseconds using cut-through switching at 32Gb.

With 48 SFP+ ports and 4 QSFP ports, each providing four 32Gb connections, it can scale up to 64 device ports for an aggregate throughput of 2Tb.

Ultra-dense and Highly Scalable

The HPE B-series SN6600B Fibre Channel Switch scales up to 64 Fibre Channel ports in an efficiently designed 1U form factor, delivering increased port density and space utilization for simplified scalability.

Each of the 48 SFP+ ports supports 4, 8, 10, 16, and 32Gb FC speeds, while each of the 4 QSFP ports is capable of supporting 128Gb.

Provides flexibility to utilize high-speed 32Gb as well as 16Gb optics on demand to meet growing data center needs and provide backward compatibility to older infrastructures.

Simplified Management with Deep Analytical Insights

HPE B-series SN6600B Fibre Channel Switch combines HPE Power Pack+ software that helps simplify monitoring, improve operational stability, and dramatically reduce costs.

Proactively and non-intrusively monitor storage device IO providing deep insight into problems and improved service level agreements (SLA).

Gain comprehensive visibility into the fabric using browser-accessible dashboards with drill-down capabilities.

Building Block for Virtualized, Private Cloud Storage

The HPE B-series SN6600B Fibre Channel Switch supports multitenancy in cloud environments reducing the number of switches required.

Provides efficient link utilization with up to 64Gb of in-flight data compression over inter-switch links (ISLs).

Internal fault-tolerant and enterprise-class reliability, availability, and serviceability (RAS) features help reduce downtime to support mission-critical cloud environments.

Are you looking to modernize your storage area network?

Today's mission-critical storage environments require greater consistency, predictability, and performance to keep pace with growing business demands. Faced with explosive data growth, data centers need more I/O capacity to accommodate the massive amounts of data, applications, and workloads.

The HPE Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C is a director-class SAN switch designed for deployment in small to medium-sizedstorage 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 Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C enables enterprise clouds, transforms large storage area networks, lowers operating costs, and deploys Fibre Channel (FC) and IBM Fibre Connectivity (FICON) on a single fabric.

Lower TCO with SAN Consolidation

The HPE C-series SN8700C Director Switch lets you easily consolidate data assets into fewer, larger, and more manageable SANs to reduce your hardware footprint and associated Capital Expenditures (CAPEX) and Operating Expenses (OPEX).

It provides up to 24 terabits per second (Tb/s) of FC system bandwidth and 768 (16 slots) or 384 (8 slots) or 192 (4 slots) 16/32/64 Gb/s in a single chassis.

Existing 16/32 Gbps customers can transparently move to 32/64 Gbps speeds without the need for a major equipment upgrade as the 48-port 32 Gbps FC Switching module or 64 Gbps FC Switch module (when available) can easily be inserted into existing HPE C-series SN8700C Directors.

It provides line-rate, nonblocking and predictable performance for all traffic conditions for every port up to the future 64 Gbps speed in the chassis.

It offers VSAN technology, access control lists (ACLs) for hardware-based intelligent frame processing, and fabric-wide quality of service (QoS) enable migration from SAN islands to enterprise wide storage networks.

High Availability

The HPE C-series SN8700C Director Switch offers fully redundant components, including fabric cards, supervisors, and power supplies.

It provides grid redundancy on the power supply and 1+1 redundant supervisors.

With the HPE C-series SN8700C Director Switch, users can add additional Fabric-3 modules to enable N+1 fabric redundancy with no loss of performance.

The port-channel capability allows you aggregate up to 16 physical links into one logical bundle. The bundle can consist of any speed-matched ports in the chassis, helping ensure that the bundle can remain active in the event of a port or module failure.

It provides outstanding high availability, helping ensure that solutions exceed the maximum uptime requirements of today's most-demanding environments.

Easy Manageability

The HPE C-series SN8700C Director Switch supports enhanced diagnostic features such as inter-switch link (ISL) and host-bus-adapter (HBA) diagnostics, read diagnostic parameters, link cable beacon, and advanced reliability features such as forward error correction (FEC) with HBA ports.

Cisco Data Center Network Manager Essentials Edition software, included with the switch, provides a centralized management tool with task-based wizards that simplifies management of switches and fabrics. Additional advanced features are available with the DCNM licensed version, sold separately.

Cisco SAN Insights delivers deep visibility into I/O traffic between the compute and the storage infrastructure. This information is in addition to the already-available visibility obtained from individual ports, switches, servers, virtual machines, and storage arrays.

Fully Integrated SAN Analytics (HPE C-series SAN Insights)

The HPE C-series SN8700C Director Switch offers state-of-the-art SAN analytics and telemetry capabilities that have been built into this next-generation hardware platform.

It inspects I/O flows to bring out a unified view of the infrastructure irrespective of the architecture or vendor of storage arrays, servers, or operating systems.

The telemetry data extracted from the inspection of the frame headers are calculated on board (within the director module) and, using an industry-leading open format, can be streamed to any analytics-visualization platform.

SAN Analytics can be integrated with and visualized by using the advanced features of HPE's Data Center Network Manager.