-written by G. David Felt, Dataram Storage Blog Team Member

In today’s worldwide economy, companies are asking IT to do more with less while keeping things current.  We have the SAN, the network and servers which IT groups are more often than not being told to upgrade while holding cost down or living with what they have.

With the introduction of 10, 40 and 100 gig connectivity, IT management is looking at ways to keep their storage up to task with the growing demand of data and also keep their networks moving along quickly.

FCoE (Fibre Channel over Ethernet) has become a focal point for convergence of the two networks into one large network.  If you are in the SMB (Small, Medium Business) arena, you might find it hard to justify a SAN to management and yet if you have grown into the entry level of Enterprise you may still find the cost to be a headache when other areas of IT are demanding dollars.

One solution to consider is refurbished Fibre Channel storage with the ability to accelerate performance.  Quality refurbished FC arrays make an excellent storage solution for company growth when paired with Dataram’s XcelaSAN.  This allows you to gain solid secure storage with high performance for a fraction of what new enterprise class storage can cost.  On top of this, the ability to accessthe storage from the network if FCoE is in the setup allows companies to move from slower storage such as NAS or iSCSI direct attached storage to the growth potential that FC SAN-based storage has to offer.

Considering non-traditional options like this enables IT to meet business requirements: holding down cost while upgrading storage and networks to support business growth.