Defense Dept. rolls out massive storage network

The Department of Defense is finishing the deployment of a storage backbone with more than 17,000 Fibre Channel switch ports to link disparate storage-area networks (SAN) and increase security and resiliency while lowering costs.

Brocade Communications is claiming that the SAN is among the largest ever built.

The project, which is now mostly completed, will give the DOD and its many branches greater ability to deploy storage as a service.

The SAN is composed of SilkWorm blade-type switches and about 30 SilkWorm 48000 Directors. In all, more than 500 switches from Brocade, in San Jose, are being used in the DOD's network.

The SAN will support multiple petabytes of stored data, Brocade said.

The SAN was designed with securely connected endpoints as well as to control access to the DOD's geographically dispersed storage arrays to safeguard highly sensitive data. The DOD has 6,000 locations in 146 different countries.

The DOD's existing storage network still has some Fibre Channel switches from Cisco and had formerly included director-class switches from McData, which were migrated out in favor of an all-Brocade network.

Shawn Landry, general manager of infrastructure services at reVision, a Denver consultancy that is working with the DOD on the project, said he would not reveal a total budget for the project or how many users it would serve, but he said hundreds of thousands of government employees would benefit from the new infrastructure. The DOD's budget for this year was $468 billion.

The DOD's new network architecture is designed in three tiers. The first tier connects the host storage and is made up of Brocade Silkworm 3016 16-port Fibre Channel switches. The DOD hopes eventually to migrate off the 2Gbps 3016 switches to 4Gbps Brocade Silkworm 4020 Fibre Channel switches, Brocade said.

The first tier of switches connect into a second tier that is made up of the Brocade SilkWorm 48000 Directors. The third tier consists of Brocade SilkWorm 48000 Director Blades, model FR4-18i.

The SilkWorm 480000 Directors have up to 256 4Gbps Fibre Channel ports for a total of up to 2.2Tbps thoughput. The SilkWorm FR4-18 Director Blade features 16 4Gbps Fibre Channel ports and two Gigabit Ethernet ports.

The project's objective is to provide common IT services for departments within the DOD that have not traditionally worked together, Landry said. The departments can continue to have their own individual SANs, and the backbone enables departments to buy lower-cost options by virtualizing the SANs, he said. New services the backbone supports include disk-to-disk backup, which also allows the DOD standardize on a single backup product -- IBM's Tivoli Storage Manager, he said.

The project also allows the DOD to start looking at storage requirements from more of a business perspective, Landry said. Previously, the IT departments within DOD were too far removed from business objectives and simply built storage networks to the highest specifications, he said. Now, the common infrastructure will help the departments understand the cost impact of their requirements, he said.

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