Continues to Deliver the Most Complete Family of Virtualised Data Centre Solutions to Protect Existing Investments While Providing a Roadmap toward Convergence
Brocade® (Nasdaq: BRCD) today announced its commitment to continued innovation in data centre networking technologies with the support of the next generation of Fibre Channel (FC) industry standard, FC-PI-5, which will offer 16 gigabits per second (Gbps) performance. Brocade solutions currently represent 67.5 percent of the FC switch and director market share. As a result, the company’s endorsement of the standard is a key element of widespread adoption. 16 Gbps FC is a key technology to support increasing data centre scale and solid state storage, and it will be critical to scaling new virtualised workloads based on its proven performance, reliability and simplicity.
Brocade’s commitment to 16 Gbps FC builds upon its market leadership in FC storage networking solutions, which includes the flagship Brocade DCX® Backbone family along with SAN directors, switches and host bus adapters (HBAs) -- the most complete offering in the industry. Brocade has also led the industry through every FC technology cycle, including the evolution from 1, 2, 4, 8 and now 16 Gbps technologies.
“Brocade’s heritage is data centre networking, and we continue to be a leader in traditional and transformational networking solutions,” said Doug Ingraham, vice president of data centre products at Brocade. “Brocade serves as the Chair of the INCITS TC T11 committee and is committed to providing standards-based technologies. With the introduction of the new 16 Gbps Fibre Channel standard, we are effectively future-proofing the data centre to enable hyper-scale virtualisation for emerging workloads and private storage clouds, while protecting billions of dollars in existing infrastructure investments.”
Brocade expects to offer the industry’s first end-to-end 16 Gbps FC product portfolio in the first half of 2011, delivering unmatched simplicity in managing data-intensive applications, investment protection for existing SAN infrastructure and non-stop networking with field-proven “five nines” availability.
According to TheInfoPro’s latest Servers Study, FC is the most popular attachment choice for the virtualised data centre, with most end users indicating that over 75% of new virtual machines will be attached to FC storage. The new standards-based 16 Gbps FC technology dramatically increases bandwidth and I/O performance and is ideally suited to address the evolving requirements for cloud architectures and leverage recent advancements in server and solid state disk technology. Server and desktop virtualisation, high-definition video, transaction-heavy Web farms and SLA-dependent hosting providers all stand to benefit from the performance, reliability and scalability of 16 Gbps FC technology. In addition, it will help customers address ongoing requirements for consolidating existing network infrastructure and accelerating data backup, replication and migration.
The recent introduction of Brocade Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS™) technology, which enables the deployment and interconnection of virtual machines from the private to the public cloud, coupled with aggressive investment in FC networking solutions, enables Brocade to help customers address escalating storage demands, data centre consolidation and growing encryption and compression requirements. Moreover, these options provide customers greater flexibility in how they optimise applications and scale their cloud delivery business models well into the future.
More Information
- The Benefits and Application of 16 Gbps Fibre Channel white paper: http://www.brocade.com/forms/getFile?p=documents/technical_briefs/Application_Benefits_16GFC_GA-TB-313-00.pdf
About Brocade
Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD) develops extraordinary networking solutions that enable today’s complex, data-intensive businesses to optimise information connectivity and maximise the business value of their data. For more information, visit www.brocade.com.
About TheInfoPro
TheInfoPro is a leading advisory and research firm that provides real-world perspectives on the customer and market dynamics of the information technology landscape by using a unique research methodology that harnesses the collective knowledge and insights of leading IT organisations worldwide. Through a combination of expert advice, actionable analysis and our extensive network of IT professionals, TheInfoPro serves as a conduit between IT decision-makers, technology providers and institutional investors. Founded in 2002 by alumni of Gartner, Giga, EMC and Bell Labs, TheInfoPro is headquartered in New York City. To learn more, visit www.theinfopro.com or email info@theinfopro.com.