Brocade Introduces Family Of 16Gbps Fibre Channel Products For Cloud Computing

Computer network equipment maker Brocade is introducing a first-to-market line of 16Gbps Fibre Channel switches and other equipment as it contends that Fibre Channel is going to be the dominant switching technology in cloud environments. The product announcements continue Brocade's strategy of developing Ethernet fabric networks for optimum performance, resiliency and efficiency. Brocade made the announcements at a Brocade Technology Day Summit Tuesday at its headquarters in San Jose, Calif.

The new products include the following:

The adapter release is "very significant," says Gartner analyst Sergis Mushell, because it's a first-ever technology to tie together all the different elements of a network fabric. He describes the fact that the 16Gbps switches will be available for the price of existing 10Gbps switches as "earth-shattering."

Brocade is emphasizing Fibre Channel connectivity because it's the preferred method of linking virtual servers to storage. According to Forrester Research, 76 percent of IT professionals surveyed say they use Fibre Channel, versus just 36 percent who use Network File System (NFS) and 23 percent who use iSCSI.

"Fibre Channel has proven to be the connectivity of choice in virtualized data centers today, and our customers are consistently telling us that they want Fibre Channel--its scalability, its reliability, its performance properties--as they further virtualize and extend out the cloud architectures," says Jason Nolet, VP of data center and enterprise networking at Brocade.

Ethernet fabrics are a more efficient network architecture than tiered networks that are based on the Spanning Tree Protocol. On a fabric network, all the switches are aware of each other and data has multiple paths to choose from.While other network equipment vendors, primarily Cisco Systems, are promoting their Ethernet fabric solutions, they're primarily just "marketing slides" and aren't actually shipping products, says Doug Ingraham, VP of product management at Brocade. "Many fabrics that you see today are very manual in terms of their configuration. Why? Because our competitors have started from a networking background ... they didn't approach it from a fabric in the beginning," Ingraham says.

De Persgroep--a Finnish media company that owns multiple newspapers, magazines, Web sites, and radio and TV stations--chose Brocade over Cisco for its recent network upgrade, says Wim Vanhoof, information and communications technology infrastructure manager for the company, at the Technology Day audience of journalists and industry analysts.

Brocade also launched a number of new products aimed at cloud service providers, including the Brocade MLXe Series Routers, which offer both 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports, the CER 2000 Series compact routers and the 6910 Ethernet Access Switch. The switches support both the present IPv4 Internet Protocol standard as well as the coming IPv6 standard.

"Cloud computing will fundamentally transform service providers and their business model," says Ken Cheng, VP of Brocade's service provider products division. "With our innovation in Internet fabric, data center routing and software-defined networking, we have the technology to enable this business transformation."

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