Brocade Committed to New 16Gb FC Standard

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced its commitment to the next generation of Fibre Channel (FC) industry standard, FC-PI-5, which will offer 16 gigabits per second (Gbps) performance. Brocade solutions currently represent 67.5 percent of the FC switch and director market share. As a result, the company’s endorsement of the standard is a key element of widespread adoption. 16 Gbps FC is a key technology to support increasing data center scale and solid state storage, and it will be critical to scaling new virtualized workloads based on its proven performance, reliability and simplicity.

                                 Fibre Channel speed characteristics

Brocade’s commitment to 16 Gbps FC builds upon its market leadership in FC storage networking solutions, which includes the Brocade DCX Backbone family along with SAN directors, switches and host bus adapters (HBAs). Brocade has also led the industry through every FC technology cycle, including the evolution from 1, 2, 4, 8 and now 16 Gbps technologies.

"Brocade’s heritage is data center networking, and we continue to be a leader in traditional and transformational networking solutions," said Doug Ingraham, vice president of data center products at Brocade. "Brocade serves as the Chair of the INCITS TC T11 committee and is committed to providing standards-based technologies. With the introduction of the new 16 Gbps Fibre Channel standard, we are effectively future-proofing the data center to enable hyper-scale virtualization for emerging workloads and private storage clouds, while protecting billions of dollars in existing infrastructure investments."

Brocade expects to offer the industry’s first end-to-end 16 Gbps FC product portfolio in the first half of 2011, delivering unmatched simplicity in managing data-intensive applications, investment protection for existing SAN infrastructure and non-stop networking with field-proven ‘five nines’ availability.

According to TheInfoPro’s latest Servers Study, FC is the most popular attachment choice for the virtualized data center, with most end users indicating that over 75% of new virtual machines will be attached to FC storage. The new standards-based 16 Gbps FC technology dramatically increases bandwidth and I/O performance and is ideally suited to address the evolving requirements for cloud architectures and leverage recent advancements in server and solid state disk technology. Server and desktop virtualization, high-definition video, transaction-heavy Web farms and SLA-dependent hosting providers all stand to benefit from the performance, reliability and scalability of 16 Gbps FC technology. In addition, it will help customers address ongoing requirements for consolidating existing network infrastructure and accelerating data backup, replication and migration.

The recent introduction of Brocade Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS) technology, which enables the deployment and interconnection of virtual machines from the private to the public cloud, coupled with aggressive investment in FC networking solutions, enables Brocade to help customers address escalating storage demands, data center consolidation and growing encryption and compression requirements. Moreover, these options provide customers greater flexibility in how they optimize applications and scale their cloud delivery business models well into the future.

More on benefits and application of 16 Gbps Fibre Channel