As organizations continue to digitize and adapt to new workloads, they need a modern storage network that supports business agility. Fibre Channel fabrics are the common thread that connects organizations to their most critical applications and data. Ninety-six percent of banks, insurance companies and retailers rely on Fibre Channel as the most trusted network infrastructure for storage. Gen 6 Fibre Channel provides the digital enterprise with non-stop availability and incredible performance required for tomorrow's hyperscale data centers.
"Legacy networks will bottleneck flash storage minimizing the performance and economic benefits of this game-changing technology," said Jack Rondoni, vice president of storage networking at Brocade. "Brocade's Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions unleash the full value of today's flash technology and enable tomorrow's next-generation flash storage based on Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe). NVMe will be the next disruptive storage technology in the data center and customers will be able to seamlessly integrate NVMe over fabrics with Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel."
Network automation is key to modernizing data centers. According to a
global CIO survey(1), 75 percent of respondents stated that the network is impacting their organizations' ability to achieve business goals. The lack of network automation and integration of the network with other IT operations is the single biggest inhibitor to capitalizing on digitization.
Brocade has led the industry in automating storage networks with the industry's first implementation of RESTful API support in
Brocade Network Advisor. This complete network-lifecycle solution brings an organization's information together into one simple, easy-to-use command-and-control application. It provides a programmable web-based interface through standard REST APIs to automate operational tasks such as zoning, scripting and reporting. In addition, standard REST APIs enable customers to use Brocade Fabric Vision technology to easily analyze fabric-wide health and performance. Brocade is also a key supporter of the OpenStack storage community, contributing Fibre Channel zone management to the OpenStack Cinder project.
New Innovations in Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel Enables Data Center Modernization
The Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio combines innovative hardware, Brocade Fabric Vision technology and ground-breaking integrated monitoring for storage IO and virtual machine (VM) performance. This delivers the industry's highest level of operational stability while redefining application performance for hyperscale, mission-critical storage. New innovations in Brocade's Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio include:
- Brocade X6 Director Family. The industry-first Gen 6 Fibre Channel director family delivers breakthrough application performance, data center-proven reliability and increased business agility to accelerate data access, adapt to evolving requirements and drive always-on business operations. The Brocade X6 directors provide up to 384 32 Gbps line rate ports and up to 32 128 Gbps UltraScale(TM) ICL connectivity ports delivering a total system bandwidth of 16 Tbps. Breakthrough 32 Gbps performance accelerates application response time by up to 71 percent over previous solution eliminating IO bottlenecks and unleashing the full performance of flash and next generation NVMe-based storage.
- Brocade SX6 Extension Blade. The Brocade SX6 extension blade for Fibre Channel, FICON and IP storage replication moves more data over distance faster and enhances security without compromising performance. With up to 80 Gbps application throughput per platform and line-rate encryption, the Brocade SX6 is designed for the most demanding environments. This purpose-built solution delivers business resiliency at scale with 32 Gbps Fibre Channel and 1/10 GbE IP storage replication over 1/10/40 GbE IP WAN connections to handle the unrelenting growth of data traffic between data centers.
- Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with IO Insight. Fabric Vision technology overcomes the traditional limitations of network monitoring by introducing IO Insight, the industry's only integrated network sensor that provides deeper visibility into the IO performance of storage infrastructure. This enhanced visibility enables quick identification of degraded application performance at host and storage tiers reducing time to resolution. IO Insight proactively monitors IO performance and behavior to gain unparalleled insight into potential issues and help maintain service levels.
- Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with VM Insight. Fabric Vison technology will include VM Insight for unparalleled end-to-end visibility into the storage performance of individual VMs. This feature optimizes VM performance and availability in a virtualized data center. VM Insight uses standards-based VM tagging to enable monitoring of VM-level application performance issues in a Gen 6 Fibre Channel SAN. Using this information, storage administrators can establish baseline application performance and identify anomalies in order to fine-tune the infrastructure to meet service level objectives. VM Insight also enables quick correlation with other Fabric Vision metrics to identify the root cause of problems before operations are affected.
Hitachi Data Systems is shipping the Brocade Gen 6 directors, blades and switch today. "Digital transformation enables businesses to deliver superior customer experiences. That cannot be accomplished without a modern and agile IT infrastructure that delivers information to customers faster than ever before," said Bob Madaio, vice president of infrastructure solutions marketing, Hitachi Data Systems. "The combination of the Hitachi flash portfolio with Brocade's Gen 6 directors, blades and switch enables businesses to transform operations and serve data to customers radically faster so they get what they want, when they want it."
