Large corporations, government institutions, and service providers require highly scalable storage that spans large areas and are highly available. Fibre Channel offers solutions for high-end SANs that meet regulatory requirements for off-site storage and disaster recovery. Typical applications of advanced SANs include banking, insurance, online transaction processing (OLTP), and service providers.

Financial institutions have special legal requirements related to data integrity and disaster recovery. Government agencies audit these institutions to guarantee that data is secure and of the highest integrity. Every stock transaction, money transfer or credit card purchase follows regulations that have direct impacts on the design of SANs.

This case study of a financial institution involves Centennial Savings. Centennial is a metropolitan bank with a headquarters and 20 branch offices in a single metropolitan area. Data is centrally stored at the downtown headquarters as shown in the network of Figure11. Centennial has been growing steadily and will open its first out-of-area branch office in a city 150 miles away. Centennial's MAN connections to a remote web host and each branch office have been overloaded a number of times. Centennial plans a number of upgrades to its existing network.

Figure 11: The original Centennial SAN is nearing capacity on their 32-port director, and the bank is paying high fees for ATM links and offsite tape vaulting. Dark (unused) fiber has been deployed in their area and Centennial is ready to utilize this new resource.

Figure 12: The new Centennial network utilizes leased fiber to connect six branch offices and the co-location facility at gigabit speeds. Centennial is considering deploying WDM equipment at each end of the leased fiber so that other data and telecom traffic can be sent across the same leased fiber. Centennial utilizes remote mirroring to have two simultaneous copies of their crucial data permanently available 24/7.

Centennial's IT department has been exploring a number of upgrade options. The IT department has discovered dark fiber exists between their facility and a co-location facility at a Network Access Point (NAP) to the Internet. With the co-location facility, the bank has shifted their off-site tape service to the co-location facility and mirrored the storage subsystem at the NAP. The mirrored storage will increase their Internet response time as well as their access to the Internet. The co-location facility and services were a win-win situation that Centennial couldn't pass up.

Centennial's new network is shown in Figure12. Centennial found that they can now lease dark fiber and have gigabit connectivity for less money than their previous T1 (1.54Mbps) and T3 (45 Mbps) connections. Centennial leased dark fiber to five branch offices to reduce monthly expenditures significantly while increasing connectivity. After buying twelve long distance ( > 50 km) Fibre Channel transceivers, they have gigabit connectivity to each branch office. Centennial is also considering purchasing WDM equipment that would allow them to carry Gigabit Ethernet and telephony over the same leased fiber.

Many financial institutions have taken advantage of the benefits of SANs. Fibre Channel has become a core technology that enables the expansion and management of complex data environments. Fibre Channel enables high levels of security and integrity that make it the right choice for highly available data networks.

xSP stands for a service provider that can deliver Applications (ASP), Internet (ISP), Storage (SSP), Business (BSP), and other services. Most service providers can no longer supply only one service, because customers want solutions that span multiple services. Many xSPs have seen tremendous growth, and mediocre network solutions become big problems when their networks scale to hundreds or thousands of systems. This case study for xSPs is based on Triak Services.

Triak Services began as an ISP, evolved into a web host, and is currently integrating On-Line Transaction Processing (OLTP) and web services for hundreds of clients. Triak's standard procedure for new customers was to assemble a pod, which is a rack with one or two servers, directly attached SCSI storage, and an Internet connection, as shown in Figure13. This model grew successfully until a customer asked, "What is your backup plan?" This question had serious implications for which Triak did not have an answer.

Table 2: Triak Services out-sources storage and applications for small and medium-sized corporations. Triak is expecting its storage requirements to grow to over 100TB of storage over the next three years for current customers. If Triak meets its business plan, three times as many customers in three years will bring the storage total to about 500TB.