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Brocade SilkWorm-Based SAN Switches Now Available From IBM

Brocade Communications Systems Inc (Brocade) announced that IBM has completed qualification of the Brocade SilkWorm 4100 4 Gb per second (Gbps) SAN switch technology. IBM is now offering IBM TotalStorage-branded switches based on the SilkWorm family's next-generation SAN technology, featuring Ports On Demand scalability, as the IBM TotalStorage SAN32B-2 fabric switch within the IBM TotalStorage networked storage solution product line.

"We're very pleased to have the IBM TotalStorage SAN32B-2 Fabric Switch, manufactured by Brocade, as part of the IBM TotalStorage portfolio of SAN solutions," said Tom Buiocchi, vice president of marketing at Brocade. "IBM and Brocade are both focused on providing IT professionals with costeffective and highly reliable storage infrastructure systems to efficiently manage data throughout its lifecycle."

The TotalStorage SAN32B-2 fabric switch has been qualified for use with IBM eServer iSeries, pSeries, and xSeries servers. The SilkWorm 4100 family technology provides up to twice the data transfer rate of other switches used today, plus full backward compatibility with the world's largest installed SAN infrastructure. With a "pay-as-you grow" Ports On Demand capability, the SilkWorm 4100 technology provides flexibility for midsized organizations, where it can act as the core switch in a growing fabric, and for large enterprise applications where it can feed data from the edge to a larger SAN director.

The SilkWorm 4100 family features redundant and hot-swappable power supplies and cooling fans; hot-swappable SFP media; hot code loading and activation; extensive enterprise-level security; fabric management; and ease-of-use features. Each of the up to 32 ports is auto-sensing for data link speeds of 1, 2, or 4 Gbps, offering full forward and backward compatibility with the installed IBM and Brocade SANs currently in place.