Brocade Advances Storage Fabric Leadership for Enterprises Deploying Solid-State Storage Systems

Brocade Solid State Ready Program Now Offers New Solutions Testing to Improve Reliability, Performance, and Scalability for Software-Defined Data Centers

Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced it has advanced its leadership in fabric-based networking by developing new solutions testing initiatives to extend support for the Brocade® Solid State Ready program. The program is designed for solid-state storage array vendors to help ensure their enterprise customers experience seamless interoperability and optimum performance when deploying all-flash and hybrid arrays to support software-defined data centers running VMware and other mission-critical applications on Brocade fabrics.

In moving to a software-defined data center where business-critical applications operate in highly virtualized environments, organizations now demand more from their storage and networks. In addition to server virtualization, I/O-intensive workloads—such as virtual desktop infrastructures, data warehousing, and online transactional processing—are requiring IT organizations to re-evaluate their storage strategies. This has led to exponential growth in the deployment of solid-state storage technologies, which will be as disruptive in the data center as server virtualization was.

To support this growing trend, Brocade introduced the Solid State Ready program earlier this year and has now extended its scope to include Ethernet fabrics, solutions testing, and market development investments such as technical and sales support, education, marketing, and awareness activities. These efforts will ensure seamless deployment and optimum performance of solid-state storage and VMware technologies in Brocade Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabrics. Program participants include Fujitsu America Inc., Hitachi Data Systems, HP, NetApp, Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, Saratoga Speed, SolidFire, Skyera, Tegile Systems and Violin Memory.

At VMworld (Booth 1513), Brocade will showcase its Solid State Ready program and demonstrate partner solutions. Brocade will also stage several in-booth theater presentations featuring program partners showing attendees best practices and other tips for deploying all-flash and hybrid array-based solutions within their VMware environments. Brocade will also demonstrate how organizations using solid-state storage can better enable software-defined data centers by leveraging the integration of Brocade Fabric Vision™ technology with VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite and VMware Log Insight. This approach provides greater visibility and actionable intelligence to help customers proactively ensure that service levels are met, optimize resource usage, and verify configuration compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.

“All-flash storage and high-performance networks have become essential elements in creating and operating software-defined data centers,” said Sajai Krishnan, vice president, Product Marketing, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. “We are excited that the Brocade Solid State Ready program will allow enterprises to realize the benefits of the collaborative efforts of VMware and Brocade in providing enhanced visibility, simplified management, rapid root-cause detection and optimal performance for workloads running in virtual environments.”

“We are now making it easier for enterprises to deploy high-performance, flash-enhanced storage as complete solutions to support highly virtualized cloud environments,” said Jack Rondoni, Vice President, Storage Networking, at Brocade. “As a result, today’s organizations can be confident that Brocade Solid State Ready solutions meet the same rigorous quality standards that have made Brocade the industry leader in SAN and Ethernet fabrics.”

The Solid State Ready program provides joint testing for Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS-based all-flash and hybrid storage arrays across multiple fabrics, heterogeneous servers, NICs, CNAs, and HBAs in Brocade environments. It also provides a holistic approach to quality that leverages the expertise, proven testing methodologies, and tools from engineering teams across Brocade to deliver the highest quality solutions. To date, Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, and Tegile Systems have completed solutions testing, with other solutions in process for completion in the near future.

The Brocade Solid State Ready program features a comprehensive battery of multiphase tests that focus on functionality, reliability, availability, serviceability, performance, scalability, and manageability of the solution. Tests include:

Confirming seamless interoperability with Brocade fabrics and sustained performance
Stress testing on different I/O workload scenarios while sustaining high throughput and IOPS performance levels using Medusa, Vdbench, and VMware IOAnalyzer tools
Verifying optimal availability and performance in multipath VMware configurations
Market development elements of the Solid State Ready program include:

Technical and Sales Support
o   Brocade product documentation and compatibility matrices

o   Best-practices guides, technical briefs, and Webcasts

o   Sales incentive and joint marketing programs

Education
o   Joint-hosted seminars and training events

o   Access to the secure MyBrocade partner portal

o   Professional services and education courses

Awareness
o   Sales guides, presentations, and solution overviews

o   Co-sponsored industry events and customer-facing, joint-branded marketing materials

o   Joint PR and social media activities

For more information about the Brocade Solid State Ready program, contact [email protected] or visit www.brocade.com/partnerships/technology-alliancepartners/solid-state-ready-program/index.page.

Partner Quotes

“Solid state dramatically increases the storage performance envelope (bringing increased I/O and lower latency), but also introduces potential new bottleneck areas in the network infrastructure.  By working with partners like Brocade, Fujitsu is able to ensure our customers a seamless transition to solid state, be it in All-Flash arrays or hybrid storage.“

Alex Lam, Vice President Enterprise Business, Fujitsu America Inc.

“The Brocade Solid State Ready program deepens Hitachi’s partnership with Brocade and furthers our joint goals of providing seamless interoperability, maximum reliability and the highest levels of performance to our joint customers across Hitachi Unified Storage and Virtual Storage Platform families as well as our Hitachi Unified Compute Platform converged solutions. The program’s battery of tests provides even more reasons for customers to be confident in deploying their critical applications on Hitachi Accelerated Flash storage technology.”

Bob Madaio, Senior Director, Infrastructure Platforms Marketing, Hitachi Data Systems

“With all-flash arrays at a tipping point for mainstream adoption within data centers, HP’s participation in the Brocade Solid State Storage Program helps our joint customers realize the performance, affordability and enterprise-class advantages of the HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 All-Flash storage system. Together, Brocade and HP are enabling organizations to accelerate virtualization and mission-critical applications for competitive and cost advantages.”

Craig Nunes, Vice President, Worldwide Marketing, Storage, HP

“NetApp’s proven, flash accelerated enterprise storage systems – combined with Brocade’s Gen5 Fibre Channel networking products – deliver the IT infrastructure that today’s dynamic data center environments demand. NetApp has led in flash storage innovation with the extreme IOPs and high-availability of our EF-Series all-flash arrays and scale-out innovation and rich data management of our All-Flash FAS arrays. Participating in the Brocade Solid State Ready program will provide our customers with seamless interoperability and optimum performance with Brocade’s networking solutions as organizations look to leverage flash across data center environments from on-premises to the cloud.”

Ty McConney, Vice President, Flash Products, NetApp

“We are leveraging the testing and go-to-market elements of the Brocade Solid State Ready program to speed deployments of our Adaptive Flash platform, which enables enterprises to meet performance and capacity requirements for any workload in virtualized datacenters and cloud environments. We’re committed to working closely with our technology partners, including Brocade and VMware, to ensure our enterprise customers experience seamless integration when managing their entire IT infrastructure.”

Dan Leary, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing, Nimble Storage

“The rise of all-flash storage is the single biggest disruption to enterprise storage in recent memory. Saratoga Speed is delighted to participate in Brocade’s Solid State Ready program to validate the Fibre Channel and Ethernet connectivity, comprehensive multiprotocol block and file functionality and world-leading capacity and performance of our revolutionary Red Hat and Windows all-flash platforms.”

Sharad Mehrotra, CEO, Saratoga Speed

“We are excited to utilize the testing and go-to-market elements of the Brocade Solid State Ready program to further validate our ability to enable a large class of applications with extraordinarily high performance, exceptionally lower power consumption and cost effectiveness relative to existing enterprise storage systems. Interoperability with Brocade fabrics better enables our customers to bring fast and affordable storage to broad range of demanding workloads and use-case scenarios.”

Frankie Roohparvar, CEO, Skyera

“Verified interoperability with Brocade storage fabrics better enables our customers to make their next generation data center deployments more consolidated, automated, and scalable. Brocade’s comprehensive testing for SolidFire storage solutions is particularly useful for our mixed-node cluster support, which supports a combination of storage nodes of different capacity, performance, and protocols within a single cluster. We also plan on leveraging other elements of the Brocade Solid State Ready program to complement our sales and marketing programs.”

Jay Prassl, Vice President of Marketing, SolidFire

“Storage fabric performance is critical for our customers in ensuring our hybrid flash and all-flash storage solutions deliver high performance and low latency storage I/O for business applications workloads such as server virtualization, virtual desktops, online transaction processing and real-time analytics. We are leveraging both the Fibre Channel and IP testing capabilities offered by Brocade to enhance customer confidence in our SAN and NAS enterprise flash storage arrays and look forward to partnering together on joint go-to-market programs.”

Narayan Venkat, Chief Marketing Officer, Tegile Systems

“As a member of the Brocade Solid State Ready Program, we are working to ensure Tintri smart storage is seamlessly integrated with Brocade VCS Ethernet fabrics. Our common key benefits of management simplicity combined with uncompromised industry-leading performance will allow our customers to focus more on virtualized applications and business services instead of managing infrastructure. The program’s stress testing for I/O intensive workloads will help validate the consistent, predictable performance we deliver that enable successful deployments for VDI and other mission-critical applications.”

Yael Zheng, Chief Marketing Officer, Tintri

“The combination of validation testing and joint go-to-market activities with Brocade is helping to accelerate sales of our solutions portfolio to help our customers deliver Business in a Flash. In addition to interoperability of the Violin Concerto 7000, 6000 and Windows Flash Array systems, we will be working with Brocade on advanced testing scenarios for synchronous and asynchronous replication and stretch metro clusters, as well as to support OpenStack-based solutions.”