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The new family of 8Gbit/sec fibre channel switches ranges in capacity from 8 to 80 ports, and offers the highest levels of performance in the industry. Brocade’s new 8Gbit/sec HBAs also set new performance standards, and leverage Brocade’s technological expertise in delivering advanced capabilities for storage and data center networks. Together, the new products offer unmatched server-to-storage connectivity and capabilities, supporting features such as fabric Quality of Service (QoS), traffic management and other Adaptive Networking services that benefit evolving data centers.

Brocade server-to-storage connectivity solutions are an integral component of Brocade’s Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture. The Brocade DCF architecture is an open framework that allows customers to evolve their data center infrastructures for maximum performance, flexibility, and investment protection. As data centers become increasingly virtualized, Brocade’s DCF architecture and products will deliver integrated server-to-storage management to better support and manage virtual servers and applications for improved performance and uptime.

The newest Brocade switches offer unmatched 8 Gbit/sec performance, doubling the throughput of previous products while also increasing power efficiency by approximately 40 percent. The Brocade 300 Entry-Level Switch scales from 8 to 24 ports, the Brocade 5100 Switch from 24 to 40 ports, and the Brocade 5300 Enterprise Switch ranges from 48 to 80 ports. All of the new 8 Gbit/sec switches help to protect and extend existing customer investments, as they are backward compatible with the large installed base of Brocade 1, 2 and 4 Gbit/sec SAN devices, including classic McDATA technology and products. The new fabric switches are available now from Brocade, IBM and Sun Microsystems, and are expected to be available from all Brocade OEM partners in Brocade’s fiscal Q3.

Brocade’s newest HBAs are designed to meet the growing performance, connectivity, and virtualization needs of enterprise data centers. The HBAs are architected to extend I/O performance at the server up to an industry-best 500,000 IOPs (Input/Output Operations Per Second) per port, an important factor in highly virtualized environments. They are also designed to support new Quality of Service (QoS), data mobility, and data encryption features that ensure faster and more secure communications between virtual servers and storage. In addition, Brocade is delivering a new, unified management tool that spans its new switches and HBAs to help customers simplify the management of their data center infrastructure. The new Brocade HBAs are expected to be generally available in June.