Once you've considered your current and future needs, buy the largest fabric building block you can afford at the time-because your needs will keep growing. McDATA remains the only company able to offer a fully scalable portfolio of products. This family approach delivers the right product for the right application at the right time. Put another way, the total cost of fabric ownership is what is important. Reduced time to deployment, reduced risk, reduced management costs, the importance of data availability, and flexibility to meet a business's changing needs are the factors to consider.
SANs are an infrastructure to themselves.
Like a data communications network infrastructure, SANs can no longer be purchased solely on port count. Also, consider the vulnerability of your organization and determine an acceptable risk-level for downtime and accessibility. McDATA is an 18-year veteran in the enterprise networking space. Mainframes provide us with many lessons, including how to build manageable systems that scale, are highly available, and don't affect applications if they go down. McDATA is focused on protecting mission-critical information no matter where it may be stored.