Brocade extends cloud-optimized SAN leadership

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Brocade is continuing to innovate and gain market leadership for its award-winning family of Fibre Channel SAN fabric solutions based on the new 16 Gbps Fibre Channel standard.

The company announced a new entry-level Fibre Channel SAN switch, the Brocade 6505 Switch, to broaden its full suite of next-generation SAN switches and backbones. This new addition further increases customer choice and flexibility for data center consolidation, expansion and refresh projects. In addition, Brocade has added new, industry-first virtualization functionality between Brocade adapters and switches to simplify server deployment and management.

Brocade also announced IBM as its first OEM partner to offer 16 Gbps Fibre Channel embedded switches and adapters, as well as stand-alone network adapters, for IBM servers. Specifically, IBM is making available a new Brocade custom embedded 16 Gbps SAN switch and mezzanine card for its recently announced IBM Flex System x240 Compute Node, a key component of the new IBM PureSystems. In addition, Brocade stand-up 16 Gbps HBAs are now available for integration with IBM System x in rack and tower form factors.

“For highly virtualized environments like ours, the network matters,” said Haim Glickman, regional VP, Southeastern Operations at SunGard Availability Services, one of the world’s leading providers of disaster recovery, managed services, IT consulting and business continuity management software solutions. “In building out our data center environment across multiple locations, we deployed Brocade SAN switches to deliver greater bandwidth and resiliency for our enterprise-ready disaster recovery services"

Fabric-based networks are a fundamental requirement in supporting highly virtualized data centers and private cloud environments, and are a critical element of the Brocade One™ strategy for providing low-latency, non-stop and easy-to-operate networks. Today, Fibre Channel is the de-facto standard for storage networking in the data center and Brocade is leading the industry’s transition to the next wave of storage architectures based on the 16 Gbps Fibre Channel standard.