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Brocade Offers Expanded zSeries Storage Area Network Solutions

Posted on: Monday, 25 October 2004, 00:00 CDT

SAN JOSE, Calif. and ORLANDO, Fla., Oct. 25 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (Brocade(R)) , the world's leading provider of infrastructure solutions for Storage Area Networks (SANs), today announced the availability of expanded IBM(R) eServer(TM) zSeries(R) SAN connectivity solutions in both its midrange and director switch families. The company said that IBM has qualified the FICON Control Unit Port (CUP) in-band management capability on the SilkWorm 12000 and 24000 Directors and the SilkWorm 3900 midrange SAN switch, providing solutions that span 32-, 64-, and 128-port platforms over a broad range of price points and configurations.

"As companies with IBM mainframes continue their migration to FICON to boost performance, they need partners that deliver a broad portfolio of FICON switch solutions as well as robust management functions," said Richard Villars, Vice President of Storage Systems Research at IDC. "Brocade's announcements of FICON support on additional switches and its support for CUP enhance the company's ability to provide its mainframe customers with a robust FICON infrastructure."

The Brocade FICON CUP implementation provides seamless management integration into the enterprise data center. CUP functionality enables mainframe applications to perform configuration, management, monitoring, and error handling for Brocade directors and switches.

"Deploying IBM TotalStorage(R) SAN switches and directors for IBM mainframe and IBM UNIX(R) environments can help storage administrators reduce costs by simplifying their infrastructure and create an on demand enterprise with business continuity solutions," said Cindy Grossman, Director of Storage Marketing, IBM Systems Group. "Brocade's implementation of FICON CUP will help customers to integrate their zSeries management applications while leveraging Brocade's high-performance trunking and network health monitoring innovations into mainframe FICON fabrics. IBM is working closely with Brocade to add the Brocade Fabric OS 4.4 and SilkWorm 4100 technology to the IBM TotalStorage SAN switch family."

Advanced FICON Capabilities

The new release of Brocade Fabric OS [See: "Brocade Raises the Bar for Storage Networking," also released today], supports advanced FICON capabilities, including expanded reach over distance for backup and recovery solutions, SAN tuning, and security. For disaster recovery and business continuance applications, Brocade frame-based ISL Trunking now supports logical links of up to 8 Gbit/sec, delivering extremely high performance between cascaded FICON directors. With the new release of Fabric OS, Brocade ISL Trunking also supports high-bandwidth links for distances up to 50 kilometers.

In addition, Brocade provides end-to-end Advanced Performance Monitoring, which reports the usage of a storage port or ISL resource shared by multiple sessions. This enables data center managers to fine-tune FICON implementations in order to ensure high application performance and to optimize network design as usage patterns change.

To prevent interruption of business-critical applications, Brocade FICON support includes the Brocade Fabric Watch threshold-monitoring tool, which proactively alerts network managers to potential failures or performance bottlenecks before they occur. Brocade Secure Fabric OS, the industry's most comprehensive SAN security implementation, also enables organizations to implement the strictest security policies in FICON and open systems fabrics to protect sensitive data.

Brocade also announced today that its new SilkWorm 4100 family of 16- to 32-port SAN switches, which runs on Brocade Fabric OS 4.4, is FICON-ready. The SilkWorm 4100, the world's first commercially available Fibre Channel switch to provide 4 Gbit/sec throughput, is well-suited for applications as a storage networking core for smaller mainframe environments and FICON tape backup. [See: Brocade Takes Storage Networks to the Next Level," also released today].

"With FICON fully supported on Brocade SAN directors and midrange switches, data center managers and storage administrators can standardize the enterprise SAN infrastructure across mainframe and open systems platforms using Brocade technology," said Tom Buiocchi, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at Brocade. "Since 1998, we have partnered with IBM to provide best-in-class storage solutions to large corporations and government organizations. We're very pleased to continue to work with IBM to build on existing SAN infrastructures in meeting future information technology demands."

About Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.

Brocade offers the industry's leading intelligent platform for networking storage. The world's leading systems, applications, and storage vendors have selected Brocade to provide a networking foundation for their SAN solutions. The Brocade SilkWorm family of fabric switches and software is designed to optimize data availability and storage and server resources in the enterprise. Using Brocade solutions, companies can simplify SAN implementation, reduce the total cost of ownership of data storage environments, and improve network and application efficiency. For more information, visit the Brocade Web site at http://www.brocade.com/ or contact the company at info@brocade.com.

NOTE: Brocade, the Brocade B weave logo, Fabric OS, Secure Fabric OS, and SilkWorm are registered trademarks of Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., in the United States and/or in other countries. IBM, TotalStorage, eServer, zSeries and FICON are trademarks of IBM Corporation in the U.S., other countries or both. All other brands, products, or service names are or may be trademarks or service marks of, and are used to identify, products or services of their respective owners.

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.

CONTACT: media, Leslie Davis, +1-408-333-5260, or lmdavis@brocade.com,or investors, Shirley Stacy, +1-408-333-5752, or sstacy@brocade.com, both ofBrocade Communications Systems, Inc.; or Wendy Lewis of FS Communications,+1-650-691-1488, or wendy@fscomm.com, for Brocade Communications Systems,Inc.

Web site: http://www.brocade.com/

Source: PRNewswire-FirstCall

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