Broadcom Gen 7 64Gb FC Switching Platforms: Brocade X7 Directors and G720 Switch

Broadcom Inc. announced the its Gen 7 64Gb FC switching platforms, the Brocade X7 Directors and G720 switch, that are foundational infrastructure for the on-demand data center.

X7 Directors

Additionally, the company announced a 64Gb FC optical transceiver, that is being qualified for use in Brocade switches and Emulex adapters, for end-to-end Gen 7 performance.

G720 switch

Brocade Gen 7 FC combines performance, analytics and automation capabilities to enable an autonomous SAN. New 64Gb speed and 50% lower latency, powers the network for storage innovations like NVMe flash arrays. It also adds self-learning, self-optimizing and self-healing capabilities to automate SAN management.

“Broadcom continues to lead the market and drive innovation with the launch of the industry’s first end-to-end Gen 7 FC portfolio,” said Jack Rondoni, SVP and GM, Brocade storage networking division. “Brocade Gen 7 harnesses the power of 64Gb/s switching technology and transforms current storage networks with autonomous SAN capabilities, simplifying management, and reducing operational costs.“

With the adoption of flash storage and the ramp up of NVMe-based storage, organizations will move more data through a SAN. This requires a network capable of performance and maximizing ROI for storage investments. Brocade Gen 7 performance is powered by 64Gb line-rate speed along with a 50% reduction in latency. This ensures that the network will never be the bottleneck for current and future storage technologies.

Brocade Gen 7 also introduces a range of autonomous technologies to simplify and automate management. A self-learning SAN leverages data collection with analytics to understand the impact of current or trending problems. The self-optimizing capability utilizes actionable intelligence to automate network management and maximize performance. Learning traffic behavior enables the network to make smarter decisions on traffic prioritization, congestion management and notification to ensure network performance for applications and storage.

A self-healing SAN raises the bar for network availability through automatic avoidance and recovery features. When potential disruptions or outages are detected, the network will automatically mitigate or resolve issues without intervention. These new autonomous technologies will simplify SAN management and enable network performance and reliability.

With almost 3 decades in the data center, FC continues to be an essential piece of most enterprises’ critical storage infrastructure due to its reliability and long-lasting investment protection. With a foundation of 6-nines availability and multi-genal compatibility, FC continues to add new capabilities and value to address the evolving needs of storage customers.

“The enterprise storage industry is already well down the migration path to NVMe-based storage systems, and by 2021 over 50% of enterprise storage revenues driven by latency-sensitive primary workloads will come from the sale of these types of systems,” said Eric Burgener, research VP, infrastructure systems, platforms and technologies group, IDC.”To get the full performance benefits of NVMe in these systems requires NVMe over FC host connections, and more and more enterprises will be installing these types of extremely low latency networks as they deploy the next- gen applications needed in the digital era. NVMe over FC is the most efficient network transport protocol for these high performance networks, already broadly deployed in commercial environments today, and Gen 7 technology will enable the performance at scale these workloads demand.“

“IT transformation starts with an intelligent core and enables businesses to deliver exceptional customer experiences for the on-demand data center,” said Dan McConnell, SVP, product management, digital infrastructure, Hitachi Vantara LLC. “This cannot be accomplished without a modern and agile IT infrastructure that delivers information to customers faster with greater insights than ever before. The world’s highest performing storage solutions deserve the world’s highest performing network. As such, our Hitachi VSP 5000 Series coupled with the new Brocade Gen 7 FC delivers leading performance to take maximum advantage of low latency, high performance fabrics.“

Brocade X7 Directors: Build foundation for autonomous SAN
This scalable Gen 7 director is a modular building block to power large-scale storage environments. With 64Gb speed and 50% lower latency compared to the previous gen, the X7 directors maximizes the performance of NVMe storage and high-transaction workloads, eliminating IO bottlenecks and unleashing the performance of next-gen storage. X7 Directors provide up to 384 64Gb line rate ports or up to 512 32Gb line rate ports, enabling organizations to scale more devices, applications and workloads.

Brocade G720 switch: Scale out autonomous SAN
This building-block switch maximizes performance and simplifies deployment, configuration and management of SAN resources. The G720 switch provides 56 64Gb line rate ports in a 1RU design and 50% lower switching latency compared to previous gens to maximize performance of NVMe storage.

X7 Directors and G720 switches are available through Dell Technologies, Inc. and Hitachi Vantara. Other OEM partners will begin shipping throughout the next several quarters

Jeff Hoogenboom, VP and GM, Emulex connectivity division, said: “Customers want solutions that help them reduce the operational cost and complexity of running storage networks, but at the same time require extreme reliability and the ability to scale as business priorities change. Broadcom’s end-to-end 64Gb/s autonomous SAN technology delivers the analytics and advanced automation needed to make smarter decisions and simplify operations.”

Drew Schulke, VP, networking, Dell Technologies, said: “With capabilities to self-learn, self-optimize and self-heal, the Connectrix B-Series network provides the performance, availability and reliability enterprises need today. Through Dell Technologies’ E-Lab, the industry’s premier interoperability lab, these new Connectrix SAN products have been tested with our storage arrays and servers to ensure our customers can confidently deploy them within their modern infrastructure to meet the demands of the next data era.”

Marcus Schneider, head , product management data center product sales Europe, Fujitsu Ltd., said: “Brocade’s Gen 7 FC products with new autonomous and analytics capabilities are great for giving Fujitsu Eternus Storage customers the performance, efficiency and reliability today’s IT environments demand. In addition, as customers increasingly adopt flash and NVMe storage, they will benefit from even lower latency and higher performance.”

Chris Powers, VP, collaborative platform development, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP, said: “HPE and Brocade, a Broadcom company, have partnered together for many years, and continue to collaborate to bring to market new technologies for the modern data center. HPE supports the Brocade Gen 7 technology and believes it will deliver value, performance and reliability for modern storage platforms. Gen 7 will be a valuable platform for enabling HPE storage, and we look forward to having this robust set of products in the HPE storage networking portfolio.”

Eric Herzog, CMO, IBM Corp., said: “For over 20 years, IBM and Brocade, a Broadcom company, have collaborated to develop FC and FICON storage solutions for our clients. With the release of Brocade’s Gen 7 SAN technology combined with IBM FlashSystem and DS8900F storage arrays, our on-premises and hybrid-cloud solutions will continue to address the critical performance, automation, and resiliency requirements for our clients’ data centers.”

Kamran Amini, VP and GM, server, storage and software defined infrastructure, Lenovo Data Center Group, said: “As a leading provider of all-flash array storage and fully enabled end-to-end NVMe solutions, Lenovo along with Broadcom, and our extensive partnership focused on innovative solutions, are delivering the next-generation SAN switching Gen 7 Fibre Channel technology to help customers accelerate their ability to gain insights from business-critical data. Lenovo’s ThinkSystem Server and Storage solutions will utilize the new Brocade SAN switching to deliver integrated infrastructure solutions that will dramatically improve application performance with enterprise support.”

Kim Stevenson, SVP, foundational data services business unit, NetApp, Inc., said: “Global customers rely on NetApp’s innovative, highly available Fibre Channel SAN solutions to realize maximum performance of their mission critical applications. NetApp and Broadcom provided the industry’s first end-to-end NVMe/FC modern SAN with cloud-connected storage, enabling customers to realize operational and performance efficiencies across their entire hybrid cloud infrastructure. In conjunction with NetApp’s leading SAN storage platforms, Brocade’s new Gen 7 Fibre Channel portfolio will further advance NetApp’s delivery of leading SAN solutions to power customers’ most demanding enterprise SAN workloads.”

Scott Baker, VP, flash array product marketing, Pure Storage, Inc., said: “Brocade, a Broadcom company, and Pure Storage’s collaboration advances the modern data experience by delivering an ultra-low latency storage network architecture to the industry-leading Flash Array all-NVMe portfolio, resulting in consistent and predictable workload performance and improved data mobility. We are proud to bring Brocade’s Gen 7 switching platforms to our customers to meet their ever-changing business requirements and deliver a greater return on investment.”