Tim Hesson, director of storage management at Kindred, said this week that two new storage area networks (SANs) using four Cisco Systems Inc. MDS 9509 Multilayer Director Switches (MDS) have replaced the old one, which was made up of McData Corp. directors and switches. The new SANs provide 800 ports.

The consolidation freed up 100 switch ports that had been used in the old network just to link all the switches together.

Hesson said the new SAN design lowered the company's Fibre Channel per-port costs by $200 each and gives every server two data paths -- so if one director goes down, it automatically fails over to a secondary network.

"I'm protected from a blade failure. I'm protected form a [switch] chassis failure. I'm protected from a cable failure, and I'm protected from a [host bus adapter] failure. I have end-to-end redundancy," Hesson said. "I think right now we're getting really close to four 9s [storage reliability]."

In 2004, with more than 50,000 employees in 350 facilities, Kindred found its data needs quickly outpacing its storage networking capabilities. The company also needed to set up a more proactive disaster recovery plan, Hesson said.