Brocade showcases management range

Brocade Communications has released more than 20 products, including new versions of its file management software, designed to make it easier for customers to access and manage their data.

The products were showcased at the firm’s analyst event in New York, US, this month. These included eight new and enhanced products for the storage area network (SAN) market, new enhancements to three products in Brocade’s

Tapestry family of data management software solutions and ten new professional services offe- rings to streamline the implementation of both SAN and file area network (FAN) solutions.

In the SAN arena, Brocade enhanced its software offerings with a new release of its Data Migration Manager (DMM) software, which is designed to allow customers to migrate data between two SAN-resident storage devices in an ‘online’ manner without application downtime.

The company also announced an upgraded version of its Application Resource Manager (ARM) software, with new support for iSCSI, which now can provide rapid server deployment in both fibre channel and iSCSI environments.In its traditional fibre channel switching line of business, the company rolled out a 48-port fibre channel blade and an eight-port iSCSI blade for its Silkwo- rm 48000 Director level switch, which lets users build larger, more scalable multiprotocol storage-area networks (SAN).

The firm also introduced an Access Gateway for bladed servers, as well as SAN extension gear that offers interoperability with McData switches, encryption and improved wide area network (WAN) analysis tools.

Brocade’s purchase of fibre channel vendor McData earlier this year was designed to establish Brocade as the market leader in fibre channel director-level switches, a market where it faces competition from Cisco.
The firm also released comments from analyst firms to support its announcements.

“Consolidation of resources is driving a significant shift within enterprise IT infrastructures and organisations,” said Richard Villars, vice president of storage systems research at IDC.

“Companies like Brocade that provide a vision of the next-generation data centre, as well as products that support that vision, are in an excellent position to help enterprises enable pervasive connectivity, fluid data mobility, and the centralised management of IT and information assets,” he added.