Brocade Expands Enterprise Solutions with Introduction of New Data Center Infrastructure and Data Management Capabilities
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Brocade Expands Enterprise Solutions With Introduction of New Data Center Infrastructure and Data Management Capabilities
Company Announces Over 20 New and Enhanced Products and Services to Address Storage Area Networking Needs and File Data Management Challenges
NEW YORK, Sept. 11 -- Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (Brocade®) (NASDAQ:BRCD) today demonstrated its ongoing commitment to help enterprises meet their growing data management challenges by introducing more than 20 new and enhanced products and services that allow customers to more efficiently access corporate information, consolidate resources, and manage their data center infrastructure. The new offerings will be highlighted and showcased at the upcoming Brocade Analyst Day on September 12 at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York City.
Today's announcements include eight new and enhanced products that extend Brocade's position in the Storage Area Network (SAN) market, new enhancements to three products in the company's Tapestry(TM) family of data management software solutions that address the emerging File Area Network (FAN) market, and ten new Professional Services offerings to streamline the implementation of both SAN and FAN solutions.
"As a partner who leverages Brocade's technology to help address our customers' needs for file and block management solutions, NetApp is very pleased to see the ongoing commitment and investment that Brocade is providing to further the advancement of these FAN and SAN solutions," said Patrick Rogers, Vice President, Products and Alliances, at Network Appliance. "Together Brocade and NetApp continue to deliver to market products our customers demand for simplifying data management, improving operational efficiencies, and driving cost savings."
"Consolidation of resources is driving a significant shift within enterprise IT infrastructures and organizations," said Richard Villars, Vice President of Storage Systems Research at IDC. "Companies like Brocade that provide a vision of the next-generation data center, as well as products that support that vision, are in an excellent position to help enterprises enable pervasive connectivity, fluid data mobility, and the centralized management of IT and information assets."
SilkWorm Solutions - Extending the Enterprise SAN
The newest Brocade SAN offerings further extend the performance and functionality of its award-winning SilkWorm® 48000 director, provide more comprehensive interoperability solutions between Brocade and other vendors' SANs, and deliver powerful data migration capabilities in heterogeneous storage environments.
o The Brocade SilkWorm 48000, the industry's highest-performance SAN
director for both open system and mainframe environments, has been
enhanced to now support up to 384 ports in a single chassis, a
50 percent increase in port density. In addition, Brocade today
announced enterprise-class iSCSI capabilities for the SilkWorm 48000 via
an accessory blade that can support up to 512 low-cost server
connections from a single slot in the director. These new
enterprise solutions will be available beginning later this calendar
year from Brocade OEM Partners.
o Brocade also announced that its SilkWorm 7500 Switch and SilkWorm 48000
Director now support interoperability with McDATA SAN fabrics via
Brocade SAN routing capabilities. Also new is the Brocade Access
Gateway, a software enhancement for Brocade bladed switch products,
which utilizes virtualization technologies to provide greater
scalability, simplified fabric management, and interoperability with
Cisco and McDATA SAN switches and directors.
o Brocade has also enhanced its software offerings for SAN environments
with a new release of its Data Migration Manager (DMM) software, which
is designed to allow customers to migrate data between two SAN-resident
storage devices in an "online" manner -- without application downtime.
The company also announced an upgraded version of its Application
Resource Manager (ARM) software, with new support for iSCSI, which now
can provide rapid server deployment in both Fibre Channel and iSCSI
environments.
"Brocade continues to demonstrate its strong leadership and momentum in the enterprise SAN arena by delivering new and enhanced director features that will further help with consolidation, interoperability, and streamlining day-to-day operational tasks," said Brian Garrett, Analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group. "The company continues to deliver on and execute on its growth and diversification strategy, which makes it extremely well positioned to help customers drive next-generation efficiencies through shared storage management."
Tapestry Family - More Capabilities for the Emerging File Area Network (FAN) Market
Brocade continued its recent series of introductions in the emerging File Area Network (FAN) market with several enhancements to existing products in its Tapestry family of file management software solutions. These enhancements include:
o Improved data movement speeds (by up to 30 percent) and greater
scalability for Brocade Tapestry StorageX® Version 5.8 software.
Tapestry StorageX is a Global Namespace, migration, replication, and
file access management solution that helps enterprises automate the
management of their file-based data. New features in Version 5.8 include
enhanced detail and automation regarding data replication reports,
enabling administrators to more easily review the results of critical
data replication policies.
o Enhanced disaster recovery and business continuity in Tapestry Wide Area
File Services (WAFS) Version 3.0. Tapestry WAFS is a branch office
solution that allows faster access and more centralized management of
file data used by branch or remote offices. New features in Version 3.0
include support for Microsoft Windows R2, expanding options for
integration into Windows environments, and TCP-IP acceleration for
faster data transmission of non-CIFS data over distance.
o Integration of Brocade Tapestry File Lifecycle Manager® (FLM) Version
3.5 with Network Appliance's SnapLock software. Tapestry FLM is a data
classification, file policy management, and archival migration solution
that enables customers to reduce the total cost of ownership of their
file data management environments by creating tiered storage
architectures.
"Brocade continues to deliver innovative features and capabilities to the emerging file area network market with its Tapestry family of products," said Brad O'Neill, Senior Analyst, Taneja Group. "Customers are very interested in new solutions to address the growing need for proactive and cost-effective file management."
New Brocade Professional Service Offerings
Brocade has added ten new professional service offerings to its solution portfolio designed to help customers optimize their enterprise data environments by simplifying ongoing migration and consolidation initiatives with minimal disruption. Among the new offerings are:
o A new family of services that help customers manage and optimize
enterprise file data resources in a FAN. These services are designed to
help customers logically aggregate distributed file storage and provide
administrative policies that automate ongoing data migrations and
consolidations in a data center. The services enable administrators to
perform these tasks with minimal manual involvement and without causing
client downtime, helping to reduce file management TCO.
o A complete set of services designed for small branch and large regional
office environments to help customers optimize file storage resources,
ensure business continuity, improve data security, and reduce
administration and backup overhead.
o Expanded SAN Professional Services to support FICON® implementation
and help customers implement mainframe technologies seamlessly into SAN
environments. In addition, SAN Security Audit services are designed to
help customers further strengthen their SAN infrastructures and help
ensure that their data is protected.
"With its expanding solution-based professional services portfolio, Brocade is well positioned to provide customers with a cohesive, best-practices approach for designing scalable, flexible IT infrastructures for managing, protecting, and ensuring continuous availability of their file and block data in distributed, heterogeneous computing environments," said William Hurley, Senior Analyst, Data Mobility Group.
About Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.
Brocade delivers the industry's leading platforms and solutions for intelligently connecting, managing, and optimizing IT resources in shared storage environments. The world's premier systems, server, and storage providers offer the Brocade SilkWorm family of fabric switches and software as the foundation for SAN solutions in organizations of all sizes. In addition, the Brocade Tapestry family of application infrastructure solutions extends the ability to proactively manage and optimize application and information resources across the enterprise. Using Brocade solutions, organizations are better positioned to reduce cost, manage complexity, and satisfy business compliance requirements through optimized use and management of their application infrastructures. For more information, visit the Brocade Web site at www.brocade.com or contact the company at info@brocade.com.
Supporting Quotes Addendum
"The growing emphasis on both the proliferation of file data and the associated, often disparate technologies for managing the data in enterprise environments has created the need for a new management paradigm," said Laura DuBois, Research Director, IDC Storage Software. "Today's IT organizations require a cohesive strategy to ensure interoperation between all File Area Network components in the enterprise -- resulting in simplified file system management, enhanced file data access and security, as well as reduced file data management costs."
"Managing massive amounts of file data intelligently and cost-effectively from its creation to its disposition is both a challenge and a necessary skill in today's competitive and often litigious enterprise business environments," said Anne MacFarland, Director, Data Strategies and Information Solutions, The Clipper Group. "Brocade's File Area Network solutions and partnering strategy provide enterprises with a foundation of network-based file and file lifecycle management."
Source: Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.
CONTACT:
Media:
Michelle Leach,
Brocade Communications Systems, Inc
Tel:+1-408-333-5319
mleach@brocade.com
Mat Small
Bite Communications,
Tel:+1-415-365-0398
mat.small@bitepr.com (for Brocade)
Web site: www.brocade.com/
