Brocade and EMC Together for Software-Defined Storage

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced that the company’s SANing management technology is available for more than 50,000 joint EMC and Brocade customers to realize the virtualization benefits of the EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform within virtualized cloud environments.

Specifically, Brocade Network Advisor SAN management software has been integrated with the EMC ViPR platform to create a storage architecture that enables policy-based automation for managing and provisioning both EMC and non-EMC storage infrastructure using the industry-standard Storage Management Initiative (SMI) interface. This integration will help reduce data center costs and complexity for both current and future application deployments by taking advantage of Brocade Gen 5 FC SAN solutions enhanced with Brocade Fabric Vision technology.

Brocade Network Advisor is sold by EMC as Connectrix Manager Converged Network Edition (CMCNE).

As a result of the joint efforts, EMC SAN customers can now utilize the ViPR platform to leverage existing storage infrastructures for traditional data center workloads, as well as provision new ViPR Object Data Service and ViPR HDFS Service through access to Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift for next-generation workloads. These capabilities can be run with enterprise storage, including the VMAX, VPLEX, VNX, Atmos and Isilon families, as well as commodity storage.

ViPR is a software-defined storage platform that is designed to provide the ability to manage both storage infrastructure (called the Control Plane) and the data stored within that infrastructure (called the Data Plane). It masks the complexity behind configuring and managing storage infrastructure, providing single point-and-click management for complex, heterogeneous storage functions.

“FC continues to be the dominant storage type deployed for virtualized environments and the Brocade integration with the EMC ViPR platform enhances those deployments by enabling new use cases built on top of the most reliable and highest-performing storage network,” said Jack Rondoni, VP, data center storage and solutions. “Brocade and EMC customers can leverage existing and future investments in FC SAN with full confidence, knowing that Brocade and EMC are both fully committed to making FC an integral storage type in the Software-Defined Data Center.”

“We have worked with Brocade to ensure seamless integration of the networking stack with the ViPR platform,” said Christopher Ratcliffe, VP marketing, advanced software division, EMC. “The result is a simple-to-use solution that automates and defines policies across the entire storage environment to further improve the utilization of our customers’ existing and future storage investments.”

The ViPR platform is available from EMC and its global network of channel partners.