Technical Brief: Optimizing Data Center Consolidation With Server Virtualization and the Brocade Data Center Fabric (DCF) Architecture

Data centers are evolving from places that house disparate IT operations into strategic fortifications for achieving vital corporate objectives. This shift from simply hosting business applications to aligning the data center infrastructure with broader business needs reflects fundamental changes in the nature of IT processes. Applications and data are now the lifeblood of every enterprise and institution. Loss of access to data can quickly lead to loss of revenue, loss of customers, and potentially loss of the enterprise itself. Whereas formerly a data center outage was an inconvenience, today's businesses are at risk whenever an unscheduled outage occurs. In addition to high data availability, modern business processes also require much greater flexibility to respond to changing requirements.