The IBM® b-type Gen 5 Fibre Channel directors and switches provide reliable, scalable, and secure high-performance foundations for high-density server virtualization, cloud architectures, and next generation flash and SSD storage. They are designed to meet the demands of highly virtualized private cloud storage and data center environments. This IBM Redbooks® publication helps administrators learn how to implement or migrate to an IBM Gen 5 b-type SAN. It provides an overview of the key hardware and software products and explains how to install, monitor, tune, and troubleshoot your storage area network (SAN). Read this publication to learn about fabric design, managing and monitoring your network, key tools such as IBM Network Advisor and Fabric Vision, and troubleshooting.

IBM® System Storage® Gen 5 fabric backbones are among the industry's most powerful Fibre Channel switching infrastructure offerings. They provide reliable, scalable, and high-performance foundations for mission-critical storage. These fabric backbones also deliver enterprise connectivity options to add support for IBM FICON® connectivity, offering a high-performing and reliable FICON infrastructure with fast and scalable IBM System z® servers. Designed to increase business agility while providing nonstop access to information and reducing infrastructure and administrative costs, Gen 5 Fibre Channel fabric backbones deliver a new level of scalability and advanced capabilities to this robust, reliable, and high-performance technology. Although every network type has unique management requirements, most organizations face similar challenges managing their network environments. These challenges can include minimizing network downtime, reducing operational expenses, managing application service level agreements (SLAs), and providing robust security. Until now, no single tool could address these needs across different network types. To address this issue, the IBM Network Advisor management tool provides comprehensive management for data, storage, and converged networks. This single application can deliver end-to-end visibility and insight across different network types by integrating with Fabric Vision technology; it supports Fibre Channel SANs, including Gen 5 Fibre Channel platforms, IBM FICON, and IBM b-type SAN FCoE networks. In addition, this tool supports comprehensive lifecycle management capabilities across different networks through a simple, seamless user experience. This IBM Redbooks® publication introduces the concepts, architecture, and basic implementation of Gen 5 and IBM Network Advisor. It is aimed at system administrators, and pre- and post-sales support staff.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication captures several of the best practices based on field experience and describes the performance gains that can be achieved by implementing the IBM System Storage® SAN Volume Controller V6.2. This book begins with a look at the latest developments with SAN Volume Controller V6.2 and reviews the changes in the previous versions of the product. It highlights configuration guidelines and best practices for the storage area network (SAN) topology, clustered system, back-end storage, storage pools and managed disks, volumes, remote copy services, and hosts. Then, this book provides performance guidelines for SAN Volume Controller, back-end storage, and applications. It explains how you can optimize disk performance with the IBM System Storage Easy Tier® function. Next, it provides best practices for monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting SAN Volume Controller. Finally, this book highlights several scenarios that demonstrate the best practices and performance guidelines. This book is intended for experienced storage, SAN, and SAN Volume Controller administrators and technicians. Before reading this book, you must have advanced knowledge of the SAN Volume Controller and SAN environment. For background information, read the following Redbooks publications: Implementing the IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller V5.1, SG24-6423 Introduction to Storage Area Networks, SG24-5470

Typical Microsoft Exchange environments are growing larger and increasingly are managing data and applications critical to a business. This makes backup and restore a greater challenge. Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) is a way to use the instant copy capabilities of disk storage hardware for faster backup, thereby reducing the time taken for backup as well as reducing the impact which the backup operation has on the Exchange server.