HDS Adds Brocade 8Gb HBAs

Brocade announced that Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) has added its 8Gbit/sec server Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) to the company’s storage networking portfolio. Brocade’s HBAs deliver unique breakthrough performance and end-to-end customer networking capabilities, and empower customers considering server virtualisation as part of their data centre strategy.

Augmenting the industry-leading performance of the Brocade DCX Backbone and 48000 Director, the innovative Brocade 8Gbit/sec HBAs (the Brocade 815/825) utilise an industry-first integration of important adapter functions into high-performance hardware. The HBAs have been designed to deliver twice the throughput of competing products, Together, the new products offer unmatched server-to-storage connectivity and capabilities, supporting features such as fabric Quality of Service (QoS), traffic management and other Adaptive Networking services that benefit evolving data centres

"We have been working with Brocade for several years and realise the importance of these HBAs to enable us to offer more value to our customers to help manage their storage infrastructure," says Michael Väth, Senior Vice President and General Manager for EMEA at Hitachi Data Systems. "We both understand the need to improve performance of data centres using tools such as server and storage virtualisation. These new solutions provide more of an end-to-end solution for our customers to give them greater choice and enhanced performance."

"With the introduction of our 8Gbit/sec HBAs, Brocade and HDS are delivering a new class of server connectivity for the evolving data centre," said Barbara Spicek, Senior Director – Sales at Brocade. "Addressing the business need to make data centres more efficient, reliable and adaptable, these HBAs allow organisations to consolidate and virtualise server-to-storage environments while simplifying overall management. With innovative connectivity features that are years ahead of the competition, Brocade’s HBAs will deliver a true competitive advantage to HDS and its customers."

Brocade’s newest HBAs are designed to meet the growing performance, connectivity, and virtualisation needs of enterprise data centres. The HBAs are architected to extend I/O performance at the server up to an industry-best 500,000 IOPs (Input/Output Operations Per Second) per port, an important factor in highly virtualised environments. They are also designed to support new QoS, data mobility, and data encryption features that ensure faster and more secure communications between virtual servers and storage.