Brocade has expanded its longstanding OEM relationship with EMC Corporation by adding Brocade VCS Ethernet fabric solutions to EMC’s Connectrix family of network switches, creating the industry’s first network switch designed for IP storage.
According to the company, the Connectrix VDX-6740B IP storage switch establishes a “resilient, agile and easily-deployed” foundation for EMC storage, cloud, deduplication and backup and recovery systems.
“Legacy IP network designs were never intended for today’s New IP applications, such as Cloud, mobile, social and big data,” says Gary Denman, Senior Director A/NZ, Brocade.
“Through our extended partnership with EMC, customers can now realize the improved performance, resiliency and agility of a dedicated IP storage network for the growing mission critical nature of their IP storage-based applications.”
Denman says EMC customers will deploy the new switch to separate IP storage traffic from other data traffic, which he views as a “more reliable and efficient approach” compared to legacy deployments where storage traffic and all other network traffic share the same network infrastructure.
“Today’s IP storage workloads can benefit from a dedicated IP storage network which establishes the same performance, predictability, availability and operational simplicity that we have been delivering to our Fibre Channel customers for the past 15+ years,” adds Jonathan Siegal, vice president, marketing, Core Technologies Division, EMC Corporation.
Enterprises are demanding more flexible, open network architectures that help fulfill the promise of IDC’s Third Platform compute model.
“IP storage capacity is doubling nearly every two years, and transitioning to higher-performance, more mission-critical applications,” adds Ashish Nadkarni, research director, Storage Systems and Software, IDC.
“To meet these new requirements, organisations should consider dedicated networks for IP-based storage as a better approach to align their networking infrastructures with business needs.”
