Clifford Chance Chooses Brocade DCX Backbones

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced that international law firm Clifford Chance has deployed four Brocade DCX Backbones as part of an European-wide data management strategy that aims to centralise storage management.

Delivered through HP and RichardsonEyres, the Brocade DCX Backbones will link data centres in the UK and Germany, allowing Clifford Chance to manage assets from a single location while consolidating existing disparate storage systems.

“Historically, Clifford Chance has always opted for a project-based storage infrastructure,” said Chris Turner, Storage Team Leader at Clifford Chance. “Our data centres were a blend of different vendors’ solutions, all serving their purpose, but adding numerous layers of complexity to the management process. In 2005, we reevaluated our strategy and began moving to a more centralized model. At the heart of this strategy was the need to reduce the number of disparate solutions across our UK and German-based data centres and simplify management. We also wanted to increase the performance of our architecture, as we recognised that this was the perfect opportunity to design a new infrastructure that could meet both our immediate and long-term business needs.”

Clifford Chance’s decision to select the Brocade DCX Backbone was based on its past experience with the company – Brocade switches underpin its storage architecture – and the solution’s ability to seamlessly integrate with existing technologies and consolidate individual switches and directors into a high port count Backbone product for ease of management. The solution has enabled the firm to move its disaster recovery operations from the UK to Germany, thereby increasing overall resilience and reliability.

“The migration to the Brocade DCX Backbone was just as we expected – simple. Having previously deployed Brocade 24000 Directors we knew what to expect and the Brocade DCX Backbone proved just as easy to manage as its sibling. It’s the only platform that has been engineered to provide a smooth transition to future technologies, such as Converged Enhanced Ethernet and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE), without the need to rip-and-replace our core network infrastructure, and we are delighted with how the project has worked out,” Turner added.

The system went live in late 2008 and has already proved a success. The Brocade DCX Backbone has provided Clifford Chance with a platform from which new services can evolve, and has significantly reduced the company’s energy footprint – power consumption through reduced asset count – in a short period of time.