Brocade Sweeps TechTarget Products of the Year Awards with its SAN and Ethernet Fabric Entries

Brocade adds two more awards to its trophy case with the Brocade 1860 Fabric Adapter taking gold and the Brocade 6510 Switch taking silver in the Storage Networking Equipment categor

Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD), the leader in fabric-based data center networking solutions, claimed the two top honors in the “Storage Networking Equipment” category for the Storage magazine/SearchStorage.com 2011 Products of the Year Awards competition. Specifically, the judges awarded the Brocade® 1860 Fabric Adapter with the Gold while the Brocade 6510 Switch received Silver. The two awards add to Gold and Silver honors received last month by TechTarget in Product of the Year competitions for the company’s Ethernet Fabric technologies.

The SearchStorage.com 2011 Products of the Year awards are presented by the editors of TechTarget’s Storage Media Group. Hundreds of entries across six categories were judged by a panel of users, analysts, consultants, and Storage magazine and SearchStorage.com editors. Products were rated based on innovation, performance, ease of integration into the environment, ease of use and manageability, functionality and value. Winners were selected from among enterprise storage-related products introduced, upgraded and shipped between November 1, 2010 and October 28, 2011.

Named the 2011 Networking Equipment Product of the Year, the Brocade 1860 Fabric Adapter is a new class of server adapter that uniquely meets all the connectivity needs of cloud-enabled data centers. The adapter’s unique Any IO® technology was a key factor in claiming the top honor, as judges stated: “The Brocade 1860 Fabric Adapter got the Gold because of its ability to support full duplex, line-rate native 16 Gbps Fibre Channel (FC) or 10 Gbps Ethernet, TCP/IP, Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) or iSCSI on a user configurable, port-by-port basis.”

By providing the ability to change port protocol profiles on demand, Brocade AnyIO technology allows data centers to better prepare for transitions to public and private clouds by allowing network administrators to seamlessly execute network topology migrations at their own pace with complete decision flexibility and total investment protection. It provides unmatched flexibility for organizations to standardize on a single adapter and choose the connectivity protocol that best fits each application’s needs. In addition, IT departments can realize substantial consolidation savings by reducing adapter cards, PCIe slots, switch ports, associated cabling infrastructure and physical server footprints. These savings can be dramatic; up to a 50 percent reduction in server rack space and 33 percent or more in CapEx costs.

In awarding Silver to the Brocade 6510 Switch, judges stated that, “The Brocade 6510 SAN Switch is the first storage-area network (SAN) switch operating under the new 16 Gbps Fibre Channel standard. Among the product’s other features are in-flight compression and encryption, and the inclusion of Diagnostic Ports (D_Ports) that let admins identify and isolate optics and cable problems.”

“At Brocade, all of our energy is directed toward innovation and creating high-performance networks that are straightforward and easy to deploy. We are glad that the judges at TechTarget agree with what our customers have been telling us all along – Brocade builds the best fabric-based networking solutions for mission-critical environments without compromise,” said John McHugh, vice president and chief marketing officer at Brocade. “What many customers are now realizing is that their Brocade switches, in combination with Brocade server adapters, deliver a powerful and valuable set of further IT improvement opportunities that could not be achieved otherwise.”

Last month, Brocade VCS® Ethernet Fabric technology was named Product of the Year with a Gold award in the “Hardware for Virtualization” category of the SearchServerVirtualization.com 2011 Products of the Year awards competition. The Brocade VDX® 6720 Data Center Switch was named a Product of the Year, winning the Silver award in the “Computing Hardware” category of the SearchDataCenter.com 2011 Products of the Year awards competition.

About TechTarget’s Storage Media

TechTarget’s SearchStorage.com is the number-one online destination for IT professionals charged with purchasing, implementing and managing storage systems at the core of large- and medium-sized businesses. More than 600,000 storage-focused IT executives, managers and staff rely on SearchStorage.com for the information they need to do their jobs. SearchStorage.com content includes original editorial features, news, expert storage advice, Webcasts and white papers. TechTarget’s Storage magazine is the only monthly resource that provides information technology (IT) executives, managers and staff with in-depth analysis and forward-looking guidance on managing, storing, networking and safeguarding the data at the core of large organizations. More information can be found at www.SearchStorage.com.

About Brocade

Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD) networking solutions help the world’s leading organizations transition smoothly to a world where applications and information reside anywhere. (www.brocade.com)

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Brocade, Brocade Assurance, the B-wing symbol, DCX, Fabric OS, MLX, SAN Health, VCS, and VDX are registered trademarks, and AnyIO, Brocade One, CloudPlex, Effortless Networking, ICX, NET Health, OpenScript, and The Effortless Network are trademarks of Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., in the United States and/or in other countries. Other brands, products, or service names mentioned may be trademarks of their respective owners.