Brocade has announced Gen 6 Fibre Channel directors for the all-flash data center.
“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 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.”
Rondoni called the moves towards the All Flash data center as potentially as disruptive as server virtualization. The move could also be as important to costs as consolidation as businesses improve on their underutilization of storage and reduce their volumes of traditional storage and replace them with faster and more efficient flash based storage servers.
The Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio combines hardware, Brocade Fabric Vision technology and integrated monitoring for storage IO and virtual machine (VM) performance.
The new Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio includes Brocade X6 Director Family, Brocade SX6 Extension Blade, Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with IO Insight, and Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with VM Insight.
The Brocade X6 directors provide up to 384 32 Gbps line rate ports and up to 32 128 Gbps UltraScale 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.
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 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.
This move to providing analytics is currently available but will only be available to customers when the partner ecosystem is ready to properly support it Rondoni added.
The Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with 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.
“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.”