Brocade 'redefines' networking for IP storage

Brocade says that it is redefining networking for IP storage systems with the industry’s first purpose-built storage connectivity portfolio for both data centre and disaster recovery applications to help enterprise IT teams manage growth, mitigate risk, and reduce costs. EMC will continue to work to integrate new IP storage technology features to the EMC® Connectrix® family of network switches and management software.

“Traditional Ethernet networks were never designed to address the needs of IP storage,” said Ashish Nadkarni, research director, Storage, at IDC. “The growth of IP storage and the business-critical nature of workloads require a new approach to storage architectures. Dedicated storage networks, both inside and between data centres, are essential to maintaining predictable and reliable application performance.”

“In delivering the industry’s first complete portfolio purpose-built and optimised for IP storage, Brocade is helping to ensure that our mutual customers can easily deploy, operate, and scale out high-performance fabrics that deliver the predictable performance and unmatched resiliency required for business-critical applications and disaster recovery initiatives,“ said Jack Rondoni, vice president, storage networking, at Brocade. “Brocade has been the de-facto standard for storage networking for nearly two decades. Our storage heritage is built into the DNA of every fabric switch we sell, whether it’s IP or Fibre Channel.”

The Brocade VDX 6740 switch, which was added to the EMC Connectrix family in February, redefines network visibility and agility with superior automation and simplicity. The introduction of Fabric Vision™ technology enables advanced policy-based monitoring and alerting based on nearly 20 years of Brocade experience and best practices in a single click. IT staff will be able to quickly deploy a resilient and high-performance storage network through zero-touch, self-forming fabrics. In addition, they can automatically provision network capacity with minimal intervention and virtually no learning curve.

The Brocade 7840 extension switch has been enhanced to support IP, as well as Fibre Channel, to provide fast and secure connectivity for IP storage between data centres, enabling organisations to better meet their disaster recovery objectives. It enables the equivalent of local replication performance, but delivers it over long distances with strong encryption to address disaster recovery requirements.

Security and the ability to more effectively utilise the high-speed connections between data centres are distinguishing features of the Brocade 7840. Moving up to 50 times more data with 256-bit IPsec encryption provides a high-performance and secure infrastructure for replication between geographically distributed data centres. New protocol optimisation technologies allow organisations to substantially lower communications costs between data centres by maximising the utilisation of WAN links. Proactive monitoring of WAN connections minimises downtime by detecting WAN anomalies before they impact replication traffic.

New versions of the Brocade storage management software suite have been enhanced to seamlessly support Brocade’s IP storage portfolio. Brocade Network Advisor will provide unprecedented network visibility and insight across all storage networks, both IP and Fibre Channel. In addition, integration with Fabric Vision monitoring and alerting will enable real-time analytics on fabric health and performance.

“EMC customers are now deploying the Connectrix VDX-6740B for a broad array of our high-end and mid-range NAS and iSCSI storage platforms. They are being installed for dedicated networks and disaster recovery to realise the same performance, reliability, and operational simplicity as for our Fibre Channel offerings,” said Jonathan Siegal, Vice President, Marketing, Core Technologies Division, EMC Corporation.

Product and Technology Details

Brocade VDX 6740 Switch

• Optimise storage performance with 2x on-chip buffering and patented load balancing and multipathing capabilities
• Integrate into EMC Connectrix Manager Converged Network Edition and EMC Storage Analytics
• Simplify the learning curve and lower OpEx with scale-out, plug-and-play, and logical chassis management
• Deploy native fabric automation and standards-based APIs for configuration and operational status

Brocade Fabric Vision Technology

• Simplify monitoring with predefined policies, rules, and actions
• Increase availability through early detection and recovery from errors
• Improve OpEx savings through faster troubleshooting and automated actions

Brocade 7840 IP Extension Switch

• Increase performance and scalability with more than 30 Gbps application throughput per platform
• Secure data flows over distance with 256-bit IPsec encryption without a performance penalty
• Improve load balancing and network resilience with Extension Trunking, Adaptive Rate Limiting and Fabric Vision technology
• Implement proactive monitoring between data centres to automatically detect WAN anomalies and avoid unplanned downtime

Brocade Network Advisor

• Create dashboard views that display the most relevant and critical storage network metrics
• See real-time and historical event data, and quickly perform root-cause analysis
• Instantly view out-of-compliance conditions, congestion, and latency concerns on flows
• View statistics on time-based graphs and use dashboard playback to correlate trends