Brocade Prepares for Take Off
Brocade Prepares for Take Off
February 20, 2007: On February 27th 2007, Brocade will launch its annual customer and partner conference. The major focus of the event will be storage area networking and the latest developments in file management capabilities.
Brocade has already announced the 5000 Switch to provide native interoperability to McData or Brocade Storage Area Networks, signalling its intent to protect customers’ existing investments in SAN infrastructure.
Graham Schultz, Brocade’s Asia Pacific regional manager, says Brocade has announced that it will continue to sell McData products for a set period, after which Brocade will continue to support the products for a further 5 years.
“We will be articulating our product strategy on mid-range switches, SAN Director products, Extension and mainframe connectivity. IDC will also be presenting, offering the analysts view of the data centre of the future,” says Schultz.
Shultz says Brocade will also be offering technical workshops, allowing attendees to dive deeply into SAN and File Area Networking product ranges. Major partners, IBM, HP, NetApp, Symantec and HDS will also be presenting.
“We’re providing a one day event offering an understanding of the new Brocade and a snapshot of all major vendors.”
US-based Maxwell Riggsbee, Brocade’s CTO of software strategy, will be sharing his insights gained over 20 years in the storage business. The ex-Merrill Lynch independent storage consultant has overseen the deployment, automation, and management of one of the world’s largest SAN.
Another standout speaker will be “Solutioneer”, AJ Casamento who has previously worked for BT and Deutsch Bank. Casamento will talk about the value in Storage Area Networks and how the technology applies to the End User business problems.
The truth on File Area Networking (FAN)
Often misunderstood as a single product, Brocade will present FAN in the context of the full product set which includes storage devices, file server devices, file systems and namespaces and connectivity between client machines and namespaces.
Schultz says, “This is a new market sector that is getting a lot of interest and is the next frontier of data management. Our traditional SAN business deals with block data whereas a FAN is dealing with file data.”
Schultz contends that the massive growth in file data has introduced scaling complexity. Some of the issues he says can be resolved using FAN include poor performance for file based data, remote/branch office collaboration, data consolidation, and legal and compliance.
The major benefits of adopting FAN technologies, argues Schultz, are centralised file control and file management. Speakers will be highlighting how, through file control, organisations can centralise access with WAN (wide area networking) optimisation, provision access management and auditing capabilities, as well as migrating shared directories or files without disrupting users. Other topics include data replication between sites and business continuity services to simplify failover capabilities.
Discussions on centralised file management using FAN will focus on automating management with policies, file classification, indexing and searching content and coalescing files for simplified access.
Schultz says Brocade will be taking the tour across the Asia Pacific, starting in Melbourne on the 27th August 2007 and then Sydney on the 1st of March before heading to New Delhi, India and other Asia Pacific countries.