HPE Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C
As data volumes grow and application demands intensify, legacy storage networks can become a significant bottleneck. The HPE Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C is engineered to address these challenges head-on, providing a high-performance, scalable, and intelligent foundation for your modern storage area network (SAN). It enables organizations to consolidate SAN islands, deploy enterprise clouds, and support mission-critical applications with confidence.
Built for the most demanding environments, the SN8700C delivers predictable, line-rate 64Gbps Fibre Channel performance and up to 48 Tb/s of system bandwidth. Its modular, director-class architecture ensures exceptional availability and provides a seamless, non-disruptive path to scale as your I/O requirements evolve, protecting your infrastructure investment for years to come.
The HPE SN8700C platform is more than just a switch; it's a strategic asset for data center modernization. By leveraging Virtual SAN (VSAN) technology, you can safely consolidate previously isolated SANs into a single, large-scale, and efficiently managed fabric. This simplifies administration, reduces total cost of ownership, and enhances security by creating isolated logical fabrics for different applications, departments, or tenants within a unified physical infrastructure.
At its core, the SN8700C is designed for always-on availability. Its architecture features fully redundant, hot-swappable components, including supervisors, fabric cards, and power supplies with grid redundancy. This hardware-level resilience, combined with advanced software features and N+1 fabric redundancy, provides the stability required for business-critical storage environments running both Fibre Channel (FC) and IBM Fibre Connectivity (FICON) workloads.
Selecting the right director-class switch is a critical infrastructure decision with long-term performance implications. Nexus ITX helps organizations navigate this complexity by focusing on a requirements-first approach. We assist in a thorough evaluation of the HPE Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C against your specific technical, operational, and business objectives.
Our process is designed to align the powerful capabilities of the SN8700C with your unique environment. We facilitate a clear comparison of models and configurations to ensure the final architecture meets your current needs and provides a robust roadmap for future growth.
Q: What is the primary advantage of the HPE SN8700C's modular design?
A: The modular design provides significant investment protection and scalability. Organizations can start with a 4-slot chassis and 16/32Gbps modules and seamlessly upgrade to 64Gbps or scale to larger 8-slot or 16-slot chassis as their needs grow, without requiring a complete rip-and-replace of the core infrastructure.
Q: How does the integrated SAN analytics feature work?
A: The SN8700C has built-in, line-rate telemetry capabilities that inspect every frame as it passes through the switch. This provides deep, real-time visibility into I/O flows between servers and storage arrays. This data helps administrators proactively identify performance degradation, pinpoint bottlenecks, and troubleshoot issues much faster than with traditional tools.
Q: Can the SN8700C run both Fibre Channel (FC) and FICON traffic simultaneously?
A: Yes, the platform is designed to support both FC for open systems and FICON for IBM z/OS mainframe environments on a single, consolidated fabric. This allows data centers to reduce infrastructure sprawl by unifying their storage networks.
Q: What is a Virtual SAN (VSAN), and why is it important?
A: A VSAN is a feature that allows you to create multiple isolated, logical fabrics on a single physical SAN infrastructure. This is critical for security and management in multi-tenant or large enterprise environments. You can segregate traffic for different departments, applications, or security levels, preventing unwanted interference or access between them.
Q: What does "director-class" mean in the context of a SAN switch?
A: "Director-class" refers to the highest tier of Fibre Channel switches, characterized by high port counts, a modular chassis-based design, and extensive redundancy for all key components (power, cooling, supervisors, fabric modules). This ensures maximum availability and scalability, making them suitable for the core of large, mission-critical storage networks.
Q: How can Nexus ITX help me determine if the 4-slot, 8-slot, or 16-slot model is right for my organization?
A: Nexus ITX can help you evaluate your current and future port density requirements, physical data center space constraints (rack units), and long-term scalability plans. By analyzing your growth projections and application roadmap, we can assist in comparing the total cost of ownership and capabilities of each chassis to align with your strategic goals.
Contact us to discuss your technical requirements and evaluate how the HPE Storage Director Switch C-series SN8700C can meet your performance and scalability goals.
