Brocade 10GbE Converged Network Adapters Outpace Competition

SAN JOSE, Calif.(BUSINESS WIRE) Brocade today announced that the Brocade 1000-series Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) lead the industry with the highest input/output operations per second (IOPS) and throughput performance, surpassing the closest competitive offerings by up to 131 percent, according to independent third-party tests.

The testing, conducted by IT Brand Pulse, focused on IOPS and throughput performance with the most prevalent, real-world business applications, including e-mail and databases in both Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and iSCSI environments. The test results showed that the Brocade CNAs provided the easiest path for connecting servers to 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) LANs and to iSCSI and Fibre Channel SANs.

"The test demonstrated without a doubt that Brocade CNAs outperform competing products from Emulex, Intel and QLogic in terms of performance, throughput and ease of migration to converged networks," said Frank Berry, CEO and Senior Analyst, Unified Networking Practice at IT Brand Pulse. "Our analysis shows that Brocade is the only vendor to live up to the promise of simplifying the migration process for the end user. They provided ease of driver installation and one software tool, Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager, to configure and manage the FCoE environment, from CNA to switch. Brocade truly offers an end-to-end solution for FCoE."

Two of the most prevalent applications in use today are Microsoft Exchange and Oracle databases. Both are I/O-intensive applications and require an infrastructure capable of supporting high I/O rates in a sustained manner and at block sizes that Microsoft Exchange and Oracle databases best operate within, namely 4KB and 8KB. According to IT Brand Pulse performance test results, the Brocade CNAs generated significantly more IOPS and better overall throughput than the competition across the relevant application block sizes in both FCoE and iSCSI environments.

In fact, Brocade CNAs provided up to 131 percent higher IOPS at 8KB when compared to the competition. These findings demonstrate that the Brocade CNAs are better suited for the demanding performance requirements of industry-leading applications.Shipments of 10GbE ports are accelerating with the increased implementation of FCoE in the data center. One of the key driving forces behind the migration to 10 GbE FCoE is server consolidation and virtualization. Almost half (49.5 percent) of the data center managers responding to a recent IT Brand Pulse survey indicated that server virtualization is driving the adoption of 10GbE FCoE.

In an effort to compare the ease of migrating servers from Fibre Channel to FCoE, IT Brand Pulse tested migration scenarios utilizing Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and CNAs available from Brocade, Emulex and QLogic. IT Brand Pulse found that the Brocade Fibre Channel-to-FCoE migration scenario proved to be the most seamless, simple and efficient in a side-by-side comparison. Brocade CNAs are currently available through Brocade OEM partners, including EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and NetApp as well as through channel partners.