Features - Storage Innovations:

BROCADE INTRODUCES NEW SilkWorm 24000 DIRECTOR

Brocade Communications Systems Inc, a leading provider of infrastructure solutions for Storage Area Networks (SANs), introduced the SilkWorm 24000 Director to extend its product family for the enterprise segment of the SAN market. Designed to meet the most rigorous high-availability, performance and scalability requirements, the SilkWorm 24000 also delivers an extensible architecture that is the foundation for an unprecedented range of system expansion and growth choices for the enterprise customer. Brocade OEM partners that have already announced or indicated qualification of the SilkWorm 24000 include EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, StorageTek and Sun Microsystems.

About The SilkWorm 24000

The SilkWorm 24000 Director supports up to 128, non-blocking 2 Gbit per second full duplex ports in a single domain and is architected to exceed stringent data center performance and availability requirements. Its high availability features include hot code activation and fully redundant power supplies, fans and control processors that are all field-upgradeable without system disruption. Based on the common fabric operating system used by the Brocade family of switches and directors, the SilkWorm 24000 is compatible with the largest number of installed SANs worldwide. In addition to current support for Fibre Channel (FC) and FICON protocols, the SilkWorm 24000's bladed architecture is designed to support fabric applications and IP protocols such as FCIP and iSCSI through the addition of expansion blades. Support for faster FC speeds, including 4 Gbit per second and 10 Gbit per second, will also be available through the non-disruptive addition of new port cards. The SilkWorm 24000 also significantly lowers the customer's ongoing operational costs by providing the lowest power consumption and most efficient heat dissipation for any director in the industry.

"Enterprise data center customers look to invest in storage networking solutions that provide their applications the highest levels of availability and performance while preserving their technology investments," said Carl Greiner, senior vice president of Infrastructure Strategies at META Group. "Whether these applications are running on mainframe or open systems, our client customers look to their vendors for a proven, extensible architecture and upgrade path that leverages their investment in hardware, software, training and skill sets. Brocade's newest director is the latest edition to its family of directors and switches running a common code base that addresses these requirements."

Extending The SilkWorm Director Family

The SilkWorm 24000 complements Brocade's existing SilkWorm 12000 Director, which has gained over 30 percent of the director market with its dual 64-port domain architecture. Underscoring a strong commitment to protect and extend customer investments in SANs, Brocade also announced seamless upgrade paths for existing SilkWorm 12000 customers to migrate to SilkWorm 24000 functionality. The common hardware, software, and management elements of the two director platforms will enable organizations already using the 3,500 installed SilkWorm 12000 Directors to fully leverage their knowledge base, tools and best practices across platforms.

Extended Investment Protection For SilkWorm Directors

In addition to delivering an upgrade path for installed Silkworm 12000 Directors, Brocade also announced the industry's first Investment Protection Initiative for directors, to provide end users with an easy, flexible, and well-defined technology upgrade strategy for its family of SilkWorm Directors. This series of specific future upgrade strategies for the SilkWorm 24000 recognizes and supports the multi-year planning and technology investment cycles for data center infrastructure, and includes customer migration paths to greater system port density, port speeds and fabric intelligence, without the need for costly or disruptive system "rip and replace" measures.

"We asked enterprise customers who have deployed some of the largest SANs in production today, to list their top director requirements for today and tomorrow," said Tom Buiocchi, Brocade vice president of marketing. "The SilkWorm 24000 is designed to meet those requirements in mission critical environments, support our commitment to long-term customer investment protection, and reduce the cost of managing storage environments, while providing the flexibility to keep pace with technology changes."