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Changing technologies and priorities are the new norm in any IT organisation. How IT managers plan for, and react to, changing environments can greatly impact their ability to support the company's overall business objectives. A well-designed IT department will have flexibility baked into all aspects of its technology ecosystem, organisation and processes. The quality of this flexibility will become starkly apparent any time the organisation is asked to scale processing loads, for instance each month for reporting and data mining; redirect and reprioritise application functionality, or simply cope with any number of other challenges that change the status quo.

It's proven that the most successful IT organisations understand the strategic importance and impact of I/O performance and its assured ongoing reliability. Next-generation servers face the daily challenge of having to support heterogeneous environments, multi-protocol I/O, higher levels of virtualisation and cloud computing deployments. How well flexibility is architected into an environment will be quite apparent when addressing key requirements including high-performance I/O, investment protection, backward compatibility and ease of use.

Flexible, networked storage connectivity will be a key component in solving the data centre's challenges and meeting enterprise business goals. Recent IDC research confirms that companies continue to rely heavily on Fibre Channel as a reliable storage technology in virtualised server environments, while wanting to experiment with new converged network solutions. With limited IT budgets, data centre managers want solutions to be future proofed for newer technologies while allowing instantaneous rollback to proven solutions when required.

SPLIT PERSONALITY
Flexible I/O technology is an integral feature of a relatively new connectivity approach provided by Converged Network Adapters (CNAs). CNAs support key ecosystem requirements in several tangible ways. CNAs are termed as having a dual personality (but not in a Jekyll and Hyde way!) and slot seamlessly into current installations, appearing as 16Gb Gen 5 Fibre Channel adapters and can be reconfigured in the field as 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE)-based CNAs. Imagine using just a single slot over the lifetime of a server to connect discrete SAN, LAN or converged networks. This is what IT managers across the UK are now achieving. In practice, this means that the evolving data centre I/O requirements we referred to earlier no longer necessitate the removal of the old technology to make way for the new.

With CNAs, IT managers can spend less time managing and maintaining their infrastructure and more time enhancing their operational efficiencies. Flexible I/O technology, by its very nature, is a more agile server I/O connectivity solution that supports the virtualised data centre of today and tomorrow with enough bandwidth to provide reliable and consistent I/O performance for virtual servers and applications. Investments to support today's technology are protected, while allowing maximum flexibility for addressing emerging technology trends. Flexible I/O technology makes it possible to migrate infrastructure to consolidated, converged and cloud networks - but at the pace of change.

The ability to adapt to changing technologies and priorities can be a powerful tool in supporting and achieving business goals. CNAs deliver customers peace of mind knowing that they are using the most stable, reliable and interoperable products available. CNAs give customers the confidence to effectively and flexibly deploy their IT solutions, minimise their total cost of ownership, mitigate their risk and protect their infrastructure investments. Flexible I/O technology can play an integral role in the flexibility of a well-architected IT ecosystem, allowing customers to extend the useful life of their servers and helping them get the most out of their IT investment.
More info: www.qlogic.com