When it came time to find an integrated system provider, the university did not look very far. "We have had a strong relationship with Brocade for many years and were interested in its integrated products," explains Cloud. By the summer of 2010, the University of Alabama at Birmingham decided it would start its converged infrastructure movement by purchasing Brocade's 8000 switch, which supports 24 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports for LAN connections and eight Fibre Channel ports (with up to 8Gbps speed) for Fibre Channel SAN communications.
The university anticipated improvements in a couple of areas. Because the systems had been consolidated, the new approach operated more reliably than previous generation equipment. In addition, the staff gained more visibility into system performance because they worked from a common foundation.
While in the long term the integrated devices offer potential benefits, in the short term they present companies with new management challenges, such as training staff to deploy and manage the new systems. Consequently, University of Alabama data center staff attended a number of Brocade workshops that outlined how to configure and troubleshoot the integrated devices. In addition, the vendor's personnel were on site for the first day of the installation and did a lot of hand-holding as the university started to understand the nuances with the new switches.
In the fall of 2010, the university started migrating to the new architecture, a process whose completion is slated to coincide with the opening of a new data center in 2013. "We are making a lot of significant changes," says Cloud, "but think that the new infrastructure will position ourselves to better support our users' needs in the future."
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