Brocade: G620 32Gb FC Switch

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced the G620, Gen 6 FC switch for storage networking.

Advancing company’s leadership in FC technology, this purpose-built and high-density SAN switch delivers breakthrough performance and scalability designed to support data growth and demanding workloads from mission-critical applications.

FC fabrics are the common thread that connects organizations to their most critical applications and data. Today, FC drives the world’s economies with the most trusted and widely deployed network infrastructure for storage. Thirty billion transactions go through FC each day and 96% of the world’s banks, airlines and retailers rely on FC. Gen 6 is the next generation FC technology that will enable organizations to address performance, reliability and scalability requirements for hyper scale virtualization, new data center architectures and next-generation storage technologies.

“FC has been an integral part of every wave of storage innovation in the data center,” said Jack Rondoni, VP, storage networking, Brocade. “Brocade continues to drive FC innovation to help customers deliver more value from their applications and infrastructure. Together with our partner ecosystem, we are now delivering Gen 6 FC products that will redefine availability, performance and scalability for enterprise storage.“

Gen 6 FC is significant for new technology such as flash-based storage, which is accelerating the transformation of the data center. As organizations redesign their data centers with flash storage to optimize application performance, they require networks that deliver low-latency, high capacity bandwidth and reliability. Today, 70 to 80% of flash array storage systems are already deployed with FC. Tomorrow, next-generation flash storage based on NVMe will integrate with current and future Gen 6 FC networks.

“Performance, availability, and scalability are paramount for flash storage architectures,” said Eric Burgener, research director, storage practice, IDC. “FC has been the network of choice for enterprise deployments due to its low-latency and HA characteristics. Gen 6 FC extends these benefits for the next wave of storage innovation.“

G620 front and rear

The G620 switch delivers increased performance across 32 and 128Gb/s links and shatters application performance barriers with up to 100 million IO/s. It includes four Q-Flex ports the can support 128Gb/s or be split out into four 32Gb/s links. Delivering high port density in a one rack unit chassis, the switch offers 24 to 64 ports for ‘pay-as-you-grow’ flexibility and scalability.

The G620 with Gen 6 Fabric Vision technology includes IO Insight to help organizations achieve greater visibility into performance monitoring. This capability helps ensure critical SLAs can be met by monitoring IO statistics, including device latency and IO/s metrics, to provide intelligence for early detection of storage performance degradations. IO Insight extends and complements automated monitoring, diagnostic and management capabilities enabled by firm’s Fabric Vision technology to simplify storage networking environments.

“FC remains a core part of our IT infrastructure because of its performance, reliability, scalability and availability and we expect it to play a vital role in the future of our advanced storage deployments,” said James Howard, principal architect, Rackspace US, Inc. “We are pleased to see the FC industry advance storage networking technology with its Gen 6 announcement and look forward to its expanded feature set and capabilities.“

“FC remains a key infrastructure component to the most demanding applications. The unmatched availability and performance continue to be a necessity for the critical applications that move the business forward. The Gen 6 announcement is exciting and reinforces our current plans to continue to deploy FC in our highest priority infrastructures,” said Dan Pollack, chief architect, storage operations, AOL.

“ATTO is pleased to be part of the emerging end-to-end Gen 6 FC infrastructure that will further extend its industry-leading capabilities. Customers demanding the highest level of performance and reliability for their systems running high-performance applications will be able to benefit immediately from this leap forward in technology,” said Tim Klein, CEO, ATTO Technology, Inc.

“Dell is very supportive of continued innovation in FC technology and the announcement of the Brocade G620 Gen 6 switch. Dell looks forward to leveraging the enhanced capabilities in Brocade’s Gen 6 FC portfolio to provide future-ready IT solutions to our customers,” said Tom Burns, VP and GM, networking and enterprise infrastructure, Dell, Inc.

“Hyper scale virtualization, larger cloud infrastructures and growing flash-based storage environments are driving organizations to deploy reliable and high-performing storage networks. By collaborating with Brocade to deliver 32 Gigabit FC technology as a foundation for SANing, our mutual customers will benefit from unmatched performance, proven reliability and massive scale to power their mission-critical application workloads,” said Peter Smails, VP, product marketing, EMC Corp.

“Gen 6 FC delivers a huge leap in performance but there is so much more this generation offers. New diagnostics and troubleshooting features jointly supported by Brocade switches and Emulex HBAs provide manageability, scalability and diagnostics to further increase uptime and reduce management overhead,” said Jeff Hoogenboom, VP and GM, Emulex connectivity division, Broadcom Limited.

“In our mission to provide customers with storage resources perfectly aligned to their individual business priorities, cutting-edge switches play an important role. Fujitsu is looking forward to harnessing the performance increase and new features of the Brocade G620 Gen 6 FC switch. Optimizing performance and flexibility while reducing administration complexity and maximizing availability – that is what we call a Business-Centric Data Center,” said Bernhard Brandwitte, VP, global storage business, Fujitsu Ltd.

“In this fast-paced industry, organizations must continuously look to innovate and transform with digitization and virtualization in an effort to ultimately achieve data ownership and independence, data mobility, and the ability to convert data into insights that can be quickly leveraged for competitive advantage. The combination of our innovative solutions, like Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, with Gen 6 FC technologies from strategic long-time partners like Brocade can not only meet this need, but also provide the maximum agility and reduced complexity needed for performance-intensive workloads and mission-critical applications,” said Linda Xu, VP, marketing, emerging business portfolio, Hitachi Data Systems Corporation .

“To meet customer needs, flash, cloud and hyper-scale virtualized storage applications depend on storage networks that are highly reliable, scalable and advanced. Customers rely on the tight integration of NetApp management software with Brocade FC switches to easily manage their high-performance all-flash environments,” said Lee Caswell, VP, product, solutions and services marketing, NetApp Inc.

“Brocade and have collaborated for years to advance FC so that our joint data center customers can simplify network deployment, maximize scalability and improve manageability. Brocade’s new Gen 6 G620 switch and the release of our new 2700 Series Gen 6 (32Gb/s) FC Adapters is further evidence of our commitment to deliver scalable, highly resilient infrastructures for mission-critical storage networks.” said Vikram Karvat, VP, products, marketing and planning, QLogic Corp.

The G620 Switch with Gen 6 FC technology is available through company’s and its channel partners and will be available through firm’s OEM partners in 2Q16.

Additional Resources:
Blog: The Matrix or Reality? The Network Matters for Storage Innovation
Video: Create a Data Architecture for the Future
Datasheet