Case Study: Rackspace Technology achieves simplified, high‑performance SAN scaling and major power savings with Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel

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Rackspace, the leading managed‑cloud provider and founder of OpenStack, needed to modernize its global SAN to keep pace with rapid customer growth and increasing virtualization. The company faced unbalanced growth, limited port utilization, and complex, location‑dependent deployments that constrained scalability, increased operational overhead, and drove up power and footprint costs.

Rackspace deployed Brocade DCX 8510 Backbones with Gen‑5 Fibre Channel, UltraScale inter‑chassis links, Brocade Fabric Vision (with ClearLink diagnostics) and Brocade vRouter to create a flatter, “plug‑anywhere” SAN fabric. The upgrade dramatically simplified architecture and management, tripled connectivity capacity, freed up to 33% of ports and reduced inter‑switch cabling by 75%, delivered major power and footprint savings (DCX claimed up to 70% lower power vs. similar solutions), improved visibility to prevent outages, and enabled a seamless migration to Gen‑5 without customer impact.

Rackspace Technology

Sean Wedige

Chief Technology Officer of Enterprise Solutions