Brocade Enhances Mgt. Suite

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD) unveiled today Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM™) 10.0, a comprehensive storage network management application that helps customers manage and secure the flow of data within and across multiple fabrics to increase productivity, scalability, and operational efficiency.

Brocade DCFM is unique in its ability to provide unified, end-to-end management of data center fabrics -- from storage ports on networked storage systems to Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) attached to physical or virtualized servers. It can configure and manage the comprehensive portfolio of Brocade storage networking products, which includes Brocade DCX® Backbones, directors, extension devices, and switches. Brocade DCFM is designed for enhanced scalability to monitor up to 24 multiprotocol fabrics at a time, supporting up to 9000 fabric ports and 20,000 devices ports. It is also able to perform real-time and historical performance monitoring to enable proactive problem diagnosis, maximize resource utilization, and facilitate capacity planning.

Brocade DCFM is central to realizing the Brocade Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture vision and incorporates the best features of existing Brocade management products. It is available in two configurations:

In addition, Brocade DCFM integrates management of both Brocade Fabric OS® (FOS) and Brocade M-Enterprise OS (M-EOS) fabrics and scales to handle the management of the physical and virtual data paths between servers and storage. It also integrates easily with existing management frameworks from leading third-party storage, server, and data center infrastructure management providers, via open standards interfaces.

In a separate release:

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Brocade® (Nasdaq: BRCD) today announced the availability of a new family of fabric-based encryption platforms that helps customers meet their security and corporate governance objectives by encrypting critical corporate data with high performance and centralized management. These leading-edge solutions offer an innovative approach to fabric-wide encryption for data-at-rest within the data center.

The new solutions provide customers with a choice to fit their stored data encryption space requirements: Either the standalone Brocade Encryption Switch or the Brocade FS8-18 Encryption Blade for the Brocade DCX® Backbone chassis. Both options provide up to 96 Gbit/sec of encryption processing power and scale quickly to meet rising customer data security demands.

Designed to protect existing data center investments, the Brocade encryption platform architecture offers integration with several leading key management products for enterprise-wide key management and data center encryption, including NetApp Lifetime Key Management and RSA® Key Manager for the Datacenter.Brocade is also collaborating with other industry leaders to support these encryption and key management solutions, including planned support for HP StorageWorks Secure Key Manager.

“The amount of sensitive information continues to grow precipitously, so organizations need a broader deployment of encryption technologies across data centers in order to protect data confidentiality and privacy,” said Jon Oltsik, senior analyst, at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Specific to storage, these security and privacy demands require an architectural approach for enterprise-wide encryption of data-at-rest while enabling end-to-end management for the secure flow of data across multiple fabrics.”

Brocade Communications Systems Inc.