Delivers industry-first Gen 6 Fibre Channel Directors for mission-critical storage connectivity and business resiliency for the all-flash data center
Brocade has announced the industry’s first Gen 6 Fibre Channel directors for mission-critical storage connectivity and business resiliency solutions designed for the all-flash data center. 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 organizations.
As organizations continue to digitize and adapt to new workloads, they need a modern storage network that supports business agility. Fibre Channel fabrics are the common thread that connects organizations 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 hyperscale data centers.
Jack Rondoni, Vice President of storage networking at Brocade said, “Legacy networks will bottleneck flash storage minimizing the performance and economic benefits of this game-changing technology. 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 center and customers will be able to seamlessly integrate NVMe over fabrics with Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel.”
Network automation is key to modernizing data centers. According to a global CIO survey , 75 percent of respondents stated that the network is impacting their organizations’ 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 capitalizing on digitization.
According to the press release, 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.
Brocade X6 directors and Brocade SX6 extension blade are available now through Brocade and its channel partners. Other Brocade OEM partners will start shipping them in the second half of 2016. Brocade Network Advisor and IO Insight are available today. VM Insight will be included as part of Fabric Vision technology in the first half of 2017.
