Brocade delivers Gen 6 Fibre Channel Directors for data centre
Jack Rondoni, Vice President of Storage Networking at Brocade

Brocade delivers Gen 6 Fibre Channel Directors for data centre

Brocade has announced the delivery of its Gen 6 Fibre Channel directors for mission-critical storage connectivity and business resiliency solutions designed for the all-flash data centre.  This extends the company’s leadership in offering the industry’s most innovative and widely deployed Fibre Channel storage network solutions, building on the first Gen 6 Fibre Channel switch that Brocade delivered in March 2016.  The new Brocade X6 director family and the Brocade SX6 extension blade for Fibre Channel, Fibre Connection (FICON) and IP storage replication, combined with Brocade Fabric Vision™ technology, enables customers to drive always-on business operations, eliminate performance bottlenecks and adapt to the requirements of digital organisations.

As organisations continue to digitise and adapt to new workloads, they need a modern storage network that supports business agility.  Fibre Channel fabrics are the common thread that connects organisations to their most critical applications and data.  Ninety-six percent of banks, insurance companies and retailers rely on Fibre Channel as the most trusted network infrastructure for storage.  Gen 6 Fibre Channel provides the digital enterprise with non-stop availability and incredible performance required for tomorrow’s hyper-scale data centres.

“Legacy networks will bottleneck flash storage minimising the performance and economic benefits of this game-changing technology,” said Jack Rondoni, Vice President of Storage Networking at Brocade. “Brocade’s Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions unleash the full value of today’s flash technology and enable tomorrow’s next-generation flash storage based on Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe).  NVMe will be the next disruptive storage technology in the data centre and customers will be able to seamlessly integrate NVMe over fabrics with Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel.”

Network automation is key to modernising data centres.  According to a global CIO survey[1], 75 percent of respondents stated that the network is impacting their organisations’ ability to achieve business goals. The lack of network automation and integration of the network with other IT operations is the single biggest inhibitor to capitalising on digitisation.

This complete network-lifecycle solution brings an organisation’s information together into one simple, easy-to-use command-and-control application.  It provides a programmable web-based interface through standard REST APIs to automate operational tasks such as zoning, scripting and reporting.  In addition, standard REST APIs enable customers to use Brocade Fabric Vision technology to easily analyse fabric-wide health and performance.  Brocade is also a key supporter of the OpenStack storage community, contributing Fibre Channel zone management to the OpenStack Cinder project.

The Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio combines innovative hardware, Brocade Fabric Vision technology and ground-breaking integrated monitoring for storage IO and virtual machine (VM) performance.  This delivers the industry’s highest level of operational stability while redefining application performance for hyperscale, mission-critical storage.  New innovations in Brocade’s Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio include:

  • Brocade X6 Director Family. The industry-first Gen 6 Fibre Channel director family delivers breakthrough application performance, data centre-proven reliability and increased business agility to accelerate data access, adapt to evolving requirements and drive always-on business operations.  The Brocade X6 directors provide up to 384 32 Gbps line rate ports and up to 32 128 Gbps UltraScale ICL connectivity ports delivering a total system bandwidth of 16 Tbps. Breakthrough 32 Gbps performance accelerates application response time by up to 71% over previous solution eliminating IO bottlenecks and unleashing the full performance of flash and next generation NVMe-based storage.
  • Brocade SX6 Extension Blade. The Brocade SX6 extension blade for Fibre Channel, FICON and IP storage replication moves more data over distance faster and enhances security without compromising performance.  With up to 80 Gbps application throughput per platform and line-rate encryption, the Brocade SX6 is designed for the most demanding environments.  This purpose-built solution delivers business resiliency at scale with 32 Gbps Fibre Channel and 1/10 GbE IP storage replication over 1/10/40 GbE IP WAN connections to handle the unrelenting growth of data traffic between data centres.
  • Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with IO Insight. Fabric Vision technology overcomes the traditional limitations of network monitoring by introducing IO Insight, the industry’s only integrated network sensor that provides deeper visibility into the IO performance of storage infrastructure. This enhanced visibility enables quick identification of degraded application performance at host and storage tiers reducing time to resolution.  IO Insight proactively monitors IO performance and behaviour to gain unparalleled insight into potential issues and help maintain service levels.
  • Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with VM Insight. Fabric Vison technology will include VM Insight for unparalleled end-to-end visibility into the storage performance of individual VMs.  This feature optimises VM performance and availability in a virtualised data centre. VM Insight uses standards-based VM tagging to enable monitoring of VM-level application performance issues in a Gen 6 Fibre Channel SAN.  Using this information, storage administrators can establish baseline application performance and identify anomalies in order to fine-tune the infrastructure to meet service level objectives.  VM Insight also enables quick correlation with other Fabric Vision metrics to identify the root cause of problems before operations are affected.

 

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