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## Main benefits 

IBM Storage Networking SAN384C-6 features the benefits that are described in this section. 

## Reduce TCO with SAN Consolidation 

With data growing exponentially, organizations need efficient, cost-effective, large-scale SANs. You can scale while managing TCO with industry-leading port densities of up to 384 32 Gbps Fibre Channel ports per chassis. You can deploy 1.5-Tbps front-panel Fibre Channel performance per slot and up to 24-Tbps front-panel Fibre Channel line-rate nonblocking system-level switching. 

Intelligent fabric services, VSANs for consolidating physical SAN islands while maintaining logical boundaries, and IVR for sharing resources across VSANs can be deployed. You can consolidate your data into fewer, larger, and more manageable SANs, which reduces the hardware footprint and associated capital and operating expenses. 

## Enterprise-class availability 

IBM Storage Networking SAN384C-6 is designed from the beginning for high availability. In addition to meeting the basic requirements of nondisruptive software upgrades and redundancy of all critical hardware components, IBM Storage Networking SAN384C-6 software architecture offers outstanding availability. The Supervisor Modules automatically restart failed processes, which makes IBM Storage Networking SAN384C-6 exceptionally robust. In the rare event that a supervisor module is reset, complete synchronization between the active and standby supervisor modules helps ensure stateful failover with no disruption of traffic. 

IBM Storage Networking SAN384C-6 director provides redundancy on all major active hardware components. Table 2 lists the redundancy that is available across all components. 

<img src='content_image/997044.jpg'>

High availability is implemented at the fabric level by using robust and high-performance ISLs. PortChannel allows users to aggregate up to 16 physical links into one logical bundle. The bundle can consist of any speed-matched ports in the chassis, which helps ensure that the bundle can remain active if a port, ASIC, or module fails. ISLs in a PortChannel can have significantly different lengths. 

This capability is valuable in campus and metropolitan area network (MAN) environments because logical links can now be spread over multiple physical paths, which helps ensure uninterrupted connectivity even if one of the physical paths is disrupted. IBM Storage Networking SAN384C-6 provides outstanding high availability, which helps ensure that solutions exceed the 99.999% uptime requirements of today’s most demanding environments. 

## Business Transformation with Enterprise Cloud Deployment 

With industry-leading scalability and pay-as-you-grow flexibility, IBM Storage Networking SAN384C-6 enables you to quickly scale enterprise clouds up or down as needed. You also receive the following benefits: 

Robust security protects multitenancy cloud applications  

Predictable high performance meets stringent SLAs  

