Brocade Advances Leadership in Fibre Channel Storage Networks with Industry-First Gen 6 Switch

Dubai, UAE, 2nd March, 2016: Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced the BROCADE G620, the industry's first Gen 6 Fibre Channel switch for storage networking. Advancing Brocade's leadership in FIBRE CHANNEL technology, the new purpose-built and high-density SAN switch delivers breakthrough performance and scalability designed to support data growth and demanding workloads from mission-critical applications.

Fibre Channel fabrics are the common thread that connects organizations to their most critical applications and data. Today, Fibre Channel drives the world's economies with the most trusted and widely deployed network infrastructure for storage. Thirty billion transactions go through Fibre Channel each day and 96 percent of the world's banks, airlines and retailers rely on Fibre Channel. Gen 6 is the next generation Fibre Channel technology that will enable organizations to address performance, reliability and scalability requirements for hyper scale virtualization, new data center architectures and next-generation storage technologies.

"Fibre Channel has been an integral part of every wave of storage innovation in the data center," said Jack Rondoni, vice president of storage networking at Brocade. "Brocade continues to drive Fibre Channel innovation to help customers deliver more value from their applications and infrastructure. Together with our partner ecosystem, we are now delivering Gen 6 Fibre Channel products that will redefine availability, performance and scalability for enterprise storage."

Gen 6 Fibre Channel is especially significant for new technology such as flash-based storage, which is accelerating the transformation of the data center. As organizations redesign their data centers with flash storage to optimize application performance, they require networks that deliver low-latency, high capacity bandwidth and reliability. Today, 70 to 80 percent of flash array storage systems are already deployed with Fibre Channel. Tomorrow, next-generation flash storage based on Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) will seamlessly integrate with current and future Gen 6 Fibre Channel networks.

"Performance, availability, and scalability are paramount for flash storage architectures," said Eric Burgener, research director, IDC storage practice. "Fibre Channel has been the network of choice for enterprise deployments due to its low-latency and high-availability characteristics. Gen 6 Fibre Channel extends these benefits for the next wave of storage innovation."

The Brocade G620 switch delivers increased performance across 32 and 128 Gbps links and shatters application performance barriers with up to 100 million IOPS. The Brocade G620 includes four Q-Flex ports the can support 128 Gbps or be split out into four 32 Gbps links. Delivering the industry's highest port density in a one rack unit (1RU) chassis, the switch offers 24 to 64 ports for "pay-as-you-grow" flexibility and scalability.

The Brocade G620 with Gen 6 Fabric Vision™ technology now includes IO Insight to help organizations achieve greater visibility into performance monitoring. This new capability helps ensure critical SLAs can be met by monitoring IO statistics, including device latency and IOPS metrics, to provide intelligence for early detection of storage performance degradations. IO Insight extends and complements automated monitoring, diagnostic and management capabilities enabled by Brocade Fabric Vision technology to further simplify storage networking environments.

"Fibre Channel remains a core part of our IT infrastructure because of its performance, reliability, scalability and availability and we expect it to play a vital role in the future of our advanced storage deployments," said James Howard, principal architect, Rackspace. "We are pleased to see the Fibre Channel industry advance storage networking technology with its Gen 6 announcement and look forward to its expanded feature set and capabilities."

Supporting Quotes

"Fibre Channel remains a key infrastructure component to the most demanding applications. The unmatched availability and performance continue to be a necessity for the critical applications that move the business forward. The Gen 6 announcement is exciting and reinforces our current plans to continue to deploy Fibre Channel in our highest priority infrastructures." - Dan Pollack, chief architect, Storage Operations, AOL

"ATTO is pleased to be part of the emerging end-to-end Gen 6 Fibre Channel infrastructure that will further extend its industry-leading capabilities. Customers demanding the highest level of performance and reliability for their systems running high-performance applications will be able to benefit immediately from this leap forward in technology." - Tim Klein, chief executive officer, ATTO Technology

"Dell is very supportive of continued innovation in Fibre Channel technology and the announcement of the Brocade G620 Gen 6 switch. Dell looks forward to leveraging the enhanced capabilities in Brocade's Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio to provide future-ready IT solutions to our customers." - Tom Burns, vice president and general manager, Dell Networking and Enterprise Infrastructure

"Hyper scale virtualization, larger cloud infrastructures and growing flash-based storage environments are driving organizations to deploy reliable and high-performing storage networks. By collaborating with Brocade to deliver 32 Gigabit Fibre Channel technology as a foundation for storage area networking, our mutual customers will benefit from unmatched performance, proven reliability and massive scale to power their mission-critical application workloads." - Peter Smails, vice president of product marketing, EMC

"Gen 6 Fibre Channel delivers a huge leap in performance but there is so much more this generation offers. New diagnostics and troubleshooting features jointly supported by Brocade switches and Emulex HBAs provide manageability, scalability and diagnostics to further increase uptime and reduce management overhead." - Jeff Hoogenboom, vice president and general manager, Emulex Connectivity Division, Broadcom

"In our mission to provide customers with storage resources perfectly aligned to their individual business priorities, cutting-edge switches play an important role. Fujitsu is looking forward to harnessing the performance increase and new features of the Brocade G620 Gen 6 Fibre Channel switch. Optimizing performance and flexibility while reducing administration complexity and maximizing availability -- that is what we call a Business-Centric Data Center." - Bernhard Brandwitte, vice president, Global Storage Business, Fujitsu

"In this fast-paced industry, organizations must continuously look to innovate and transform with digitization and virtualization in an effort to ultimately achieve data ownership and independence, data mobility, and the ability to convert data into insights that can be quickly leveraged for competitive advantage. The combination of our innovative solutions, like Hitachi Virtual Storage Platform, with Gen 6 Fibre Channel technologies from strategic long-time partners like Brocade can not only meet this need, but also provide the maximum agility and reduced complexity needed for performance-intensive workloads and mission-critical applications." - Linda Xu, vice president of marketing, Emerging Business Portfolio, Hitachi Data Systems

"To meet customer needs, flash, cloud and hyper-scale virtualized storage applications depend on data storage networks that are highly reliable, scalable and advanced. Customers rely on the tight integration of NetApp management software with Brocade Fibre Channel switches to easily manage their high-performance all-flash environments." - Lee Caswell, vice president of product, solutions and services marketing, NetApp

"Brocade and QLogic have collaborated for years to advance Fibre Channel so that our joint data center customers can simplify network deployment, maximize scalability and improve manageability. Brocade's new Gen 6 G620 switch and the release of our new QLogic 2700 Series Gen 6 (32 Gbps) Fibre Channel Adapters is further evidence of our commitment to deliver scalable, highly resilient infrastructures for mission-critical storage networks." - Vikram Karvat, vice president of products, marketing and planning, QLogic