Brocade Releases Bevy of Upgrades and Services

September 29th, 2006: Brocade has announced a flurry of enhanced products and services this week to address new storage area networking (SAN) needs and file data management challenges.

With eight new and updated SAN products, three upgrades to its Tapestry data management software line for file area networking (FAN), and ten new services promising to streamline the implementation of SANs and FANs, the company certainly isn’t messing around.

For starters, the company’s SilkWorm 4800 SAN director has seen a 50 percent increase in port density, brining support up to 384 ports in one chassis, while Brocade has also announced enterprise-class iSCSI capabilities for it via an accessory blade that can support up to 512 low-cost server connections from a single slot in the director.

Brocade also announced that its SilkWorm 7500 Switch and SilkWorm 48000 Director now support interoperability with McDATA SAN fabrics via Brocade SAN routing capabilities. As for software, the company says it has enhanced its offerings for SAN environments with a new release of its Data Migration Manager (DMM), which is designed to enable customers to migrate data between two SAN-resident storage devices without application downtime.

Along with its hardware upgrades, Brocade says that its Tapestry family improvements include:

• Improved data movement speeds (by up to 30 percent) and greater scalability for Brocade Tapestry StorageX software.
• Enhanced disaster recovery and business continuity in Tapestry Wide Area File Services (WAFS) 3.0, including TCP-IP acceleration for faster data transmission of non-CIFS data over distance.
• Integration of Brocade Tapestry File Lifecycle Manager Version 3.5 with Network Appliance's SnapLock software.

In regards to services, Brocade has ten new offerings in its deck that is says will help customers optimise their enterprise data environments by simplifying ongoing migration and consolidation initiatives with minimal disruption. Among the new offerings are:

• A new family of services that help customers manage and optimise enterprise file data resources in a FAN.
• A complete set of services designed for small branch and large regional office environments to help optimise file storage resources, ensure business continuity, improve data security, and reduce administration and backup overhead.
• Expanded SAN Professional Services to support FICON implementation and help customers implement mainframe technologies seamlessly into SAN environments.

The new products and solutions will be available later this year.

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