Miscellaneous Management Systems
Microsoft Upgrades Customer Test Center with Brocade Solutions
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Microsoft Extends Its Partnership with Brocade and Responds to Customer Demands by Deploying Brocade SAN Directors, Switches, and Management Systems at Its Enterprise Engineering Center
SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 5 -- Brocade® (NASDAQ: BRCD), a leader in data center networking solutions that help enterprises connect and manage their information, today announced that the Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center has enhanced its Storage Area Network (SAN) environment with Brocade systems in response to the constantly changing needs of Fortune 1000 customers evaluating Microsoft products at the Enterprise Engineering Center.
Located on Microsoft's Redmond, Washington, campus, the Enterprise Engineering Center implemented 4 Gbit/sec Brocade 48000 Directors, SAN switches, and Fabric Manager software to enable a seamless and stable SAN environment for customers to simulate how new Microsoft solutions operate in real-world conditions. The Enterprise Engineering Center hosts customers who are testing and validating planned upgrades, migrations, or deployments of Microsoft's next-generation enterprise software and solutions. With more than 500 servers and nearly 600 terabytes of SAN storage, the Enterprise Engineering Center is one of the largest customer validation and test labs in the world. The Brocade infrastructure allows the Enterprise Engineering Center to rapidly configure and isolate customers' product tests on a single physical SAN fabric, ensuring privacy and greatly reducing the center's management requirements.
"We are excited to partner with Brocade and have their storage solutions serve a key role in the Enterprise Engineering Center," said Bill Laing, general manager of the Windows Server Division at Microsoft Corporation. "Partners like Brocade play a key role in our ability to host many of the world's leading corporations in order for them to test our next-generation solutions as well as validate our product vision."
Complete Solutions for High-End Development
Brocade is the industry-leader in robust, enterprise-class SANs and has partnered with the Enterprise Engineering Center since the center's creation in 2002. The Enterprise Engineering Center has deployed a pair of Brocade 48000 Directors on its SAN to provide customers with the highest bandwidth and most power-efficient switching solution available. The platforms form the core of a 600-port infrastructure with dual fabrics for redundancy and load balancing, and support 600 terabytes of storage. Moreover, the center achieves extremely fast core-to-edge throughput by using Brocade 4900 and 4100 Switches to link the various storage platforms.
The Brocade solution enables the Enterprise Engineering Center to safeguard the terabytes of live data and corporate Active Directory structures entrusted to Microsoft during test engagements. Utilizing the capabilities of Brocade Fabric OS®, Microsoft can create virtual domains that segregate each customer's tests to provide security during engagements, which often last for weeks. Customers can even change zoning and other parameters during tests without impacting the ongoing evaluations of other companies.
"Traditionally we had to construct dedicated SAN fabrics to assure each customer's security, which was laborious and time-consuming," said Scott Napolitan, group manager, Microsoft Enterprise Engineering Center. "With the Brocade technology, our engagement engineers can now tailor fabric environments for each customer rapidly and easily. We have up to five customer engagements on one physical network, enabling them to evaluate our products in a more time-efficient manner."
The Brocade solution further improves the center's productivity through the Brocade Fabric Manager application. Administrators can create, monitor, and dynamically provision multiple virtual SAN domains with any onsite devices without manually reconfiguring cables. From a central console, they can even assign ports on any attached device for customers' exclusive use, enabling multiple companies to share a single platform.
About Brocade
Brocade is a leading provider of data center networking solutions that help organizations connect, share, and manage their information. Organizations that use Brocade products and services are better able to optimize their IT infrastructures and ensure compliant data management. For more information, visit the Brocade Web site at www.brocade.com/ or contact the company at info@brocade.com.
Source: Brocade
CONTACT: Media Relations, Kathryn Craig of Brocade, +1-832-230-2249, kcraig@brocade.com; or Ian Yellin, +1-415-677-2714, ian.yellin@ogilvypr.com, of Ogilvy PR for Brocade
Web site: www.brocade.com/
