Brocade Delivers on Interoperable Promises

February 9, 2007: In the first of its talked up interoperable commitments, Brocade has launched the Brocade Access Gateway to ease connectivity of bladed servers to other vendor’s SAN fabrics.

As Brocade consolidated its acquisition of McData last week, their new product roadmap was released with the commitment made to where possible, ensure interoperability between Brocade and McData products.

Brocade says the Access Gateway is the first solution to fulfil such commitments. The solution enables interoperability between Brocade blade server SAN switches and products from other SAN switch and director manufacturers. It will be available on Brocade bladed SAN switches from HP, IBM, Dell and Fujitsu-Siemens.

Tom Buiocchi, vice president of Worldwide Marketing for Brocade, says the solution reflects the increasing move to bladed systems. “Our new Access gateway capabilities will allow companies to deploy bladed server solutions with unprecedented simplicity, scalability, and interoperability,” he says.

Specifically designed to eliminate heterogeneous switch-to-switch interoperability challenges, Brocade says the solution will offer seamless connectivity with any SAN fabric, lower total cost of ownership, improved scalability and overall simplified management.

According to IDC, building interoperability in SAN environments gives companies the reassurance they need to invest in blade servers for their data centre plans. “For many companies blade servers are a key element in the ongoing evolution of their data centres, so it is critical that these systems be easily integrated into existing SAN environments,” says Richard Villars, vice president of Storage Systems Research at IDC.

Brocade believes that interoperability is the cornerstone of simplified SAN management. The Access Gateway has broad OEM partner support and is a products that reflects Brocade’s membership in the BladeSystem Solution Builder Program for interconnectivity options.

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