Broadcom unveils industry’s first gen 7 64Gb/s Fibre Channel switching platforms

Broadcom unveils industry’s first gen 7 64Gb/s Fibre Channel switching platforms

Broadcom has announced the availability of the industry’s first Gen 7 64Gb/s Fibre Channel switching platforms — the Brocade X7 Directors and G720 Switch, that are foundational infrastructure for the on-demand data centre. Additionally, the company has announced the industry’s first 64Gb/s Fibre Channel optical transceiver that is being qualified for use in Brocade switches and Emulex adapters, for end-to-end Gen 7 performance.

Brocade Gen 7 Fibre Channel combines unmatched performance, powerful analytics and advanced automation capabilities to enable an autonomous SAN. New 64Gb/s speed and 50% lower latency powers the network for storage innovations like NVMe flash arrays. Gen 7 also adds new self-learning, self-optimising and self-healing capabilities to automate SAN management. With the launch of Gen 7 Fibre Channel switching platforms, Broadcom is demonstrating its commitment to develop innovative Fibre Channel technology for the most trusted network for storage.

“Broadcom continues to lead the market and drive innovation with the launch of the industry’s first end-to-end Gen 7 Fibre Channel portfolio,” said Jack Rondoni, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Brocade Storage Networking division, Broadcom. “Brocade Gen 7 harnesses the power of 64Gb/s switching technology and transforms current storage networks with autonomous SAN capabilities, simplifying management and significantly reducing operational costs.”

Technology is evolving at an incredible pace and businesses are demanding more from their IT resources and infrastructure. With the rapid adoption of flash storage and the ramp up of NVMe-based storage, organisations will move more data through a SAN than ever before. This requires a network capable of unleashing performance and maximising ROI for storage investments. Brocade Gen 7 performance is powered by 64Gb/s line-rate speed along with a 50% reduction in latency. This ensures that the network will never be the bottleneck for current and future storage technologies.

Brocade Gen 7 also introduces a range of autonomous technologies to simplify and automate management. A self-learning SAN leverages comprehensive data collection with powerful analytics to quickly understand the impact of current or trending problems. The self-optimising capability utilises actionable intelligence to automate network management and maximise performance. Learning traffic behaviour enables the network to make smarter decisions on traffic prioritisation, congestion management and notification to ensure optimal network performance for applications and storage.

A self-healing SAN raises the bar for network availability through automatic avoidance and recovery features. When potential disruptions or outages are detected, the network will automatically mitigate or resolve issues without intervention. These new autonomous technologies will greatly simplify SAN management and enable unparalleled network performance and reliability.

With almost three decades in the data centre, Fibre Channel continues to be an essential piece of most enterprises’ critical storage infrastructure due to its industry-leading reliability and long-lasting investment protection. With a foundation of six-nines availability and multi-generational compatibility, Fibre Channel continues to add new capabilities and value to address the evolving needs of storage customers. 

“The enterprise storage industry is already well down the migration path to NVMe-based storage systems and by 2021, over 50% of enterprise storage revenues driven by latency-sensitive primary workloads will come from the sale of these types of systems,” said Eric Burgener, Research Vice President, Infrastructure Systems, Platforms and Technologies Group, IDC. “To get the full performance benefits of NVMe in these systems requires NVMe over FC host connections and more and more enterprises will be installing these types of extremely low latency networks as they deploy the next-generation applications needed in the digital era. NVMe over FC is the most efficient network transport protocol for these high-performance networks, already broadly deployed in commercial environments today, and Gen 7 technology will enable the performance at scale these workloads demand.”

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