EMC and Brocade in Joint Development

EMC Corporation and Brocade announced increased investment in joint engineering and solution development to expand their existing broad portfolio of solutions that drive IT efficiencies for both physical and virtual enterprise application environments. Customers are increasingly expecting their data center to deliver as a whole and are facing new challenges by integrating their applications, middleware and database environments with their infrastructure to achieve efficiencies. EMC and Brocade are committed to delivering simplified integrated solutions that optimize data center infrastructure to drive down costs today while laying the foundation to address future data center requirements.

EMC and Brocade have worked together for 12 years delivering innovative and industry-leading solutions that address key customer pain points. Through bringing together core network and storage components in conjunction with applications, EMC and Brocade joint engineering efforts will deliver solutions to simplify the evolution of the data center to provide additional cost efficiency within the data center in four areas:

• Consolidation: Network protocol convergence utilizing Brocade DCX Backbone solutions to unify Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) protocols as well as enhanced performance and reduced energy consumption through EMC tiered storage and Enterprise Flash Drives.
• Application-oriented Virtualization: Providing infrastructure solutions for enterprise applications such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft Exchange Server enabled by Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware.
• Application-aware protection: Heterogeneous data movement and consistent-recovery with EMC RecoverPoint and Brocade storage networking connectivity, as well as data center secure encryption utilizing RSA Key Manager.
• Next-generation backup and recovery: Unified backup and recovery management with EMC NetWorker as well as advanced data deduplication with EMC Avamar ®and EMC Disk Library to reduce backup costs and speed recovery.

EMC and Brocade have increased investment by committing resources to EMC’s network of global Solution Centers where the teams will design, test and document integrated technology architectures and configuration guides that simplify and accelerate deployment. This joint effort will focus on end-to-end testing of real world Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP environments built upon Brocade’s DCX Backbone platform and EMC technology, including the new EMC Symmetrix V-Max and EMC CLARiiON CX4 now shipping 8 Gb/s FC UltraFlex connectivity, EMC qualified Brocade 8Gb/s Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) as well as end-to-end management and security software from RSA, the security division of EMC, representing the building blocks of a virtualized infrastructure.

The new solutions will be rounded out by broad professional services portfolio and expertise to provide customers design and assessment offerings across practices. In addition, EMC and Brocade have a long history of tightly integrated joint support processes, including the establishment of a rapid escalation process which provides a dedicated path within EMC and Brocade support organizations, delivering faster resolution to critical support issues.

"Brocade’s differentiated strategy is to combine our best-in-class storage and IP networking solutions and services in conjunction with a wide ecosystem of partners, including industry-leading solutions from EMC," said Marc Randall, senior vice president of Products and Offerings at Brocade. "Brocade and EMC have enjoyed a long history of joint development and building solutions for data center customers. We offer our customers the ability to deploy a consolidated data center infrastructure to improve IT resource utilization, maximize performance and efficiency, and reduce costs through deep integration with EMC’s outstanding portfolio of offerings."

"Our customers are expecting more out of their IT infrastructure. They want simplified integrated solutions that drive more efficiency and help them seamlessly evolve their data centers," said Frank Hauck, executive vice president, EMC storage division, global marketing, and customer quality. "The powerful combination of EMC and Brocade offers customers the building blocks and solutions required to safely architect their data center for future requirements today."