Brocade Storage Fabrics Purpose-Built for New EMC XtremIO 4.0 All-Flash Arrays

Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced its Fibre Channel and IP-based storage networking technologies will be deployed by EMC as a key component for customer solutions based on the new EMC® XtremIO™ 4.0 all-flash storage arrays that were announced today at EMC World.

Brocade® storage network switches, along with related storage management software, are branded and sold by EMC as part of the EMC Connectrix® family.

Deployment of all-flash arrays has experienced exponential growth, as enterprises move to managing both mission-critical and business-critical applications in consolidated, highly virtualized environments. According to Gartner, “By 2019, 50 percent of traditional general-purpose storage arrays used for low-latency, high-performance workloads will be replaced by SSAs [solid-state arrays].”1

XtremIO 4.0 is a non-disruptive free software upgrade for XtremIO v3.X arrays, which have become the industry’s top-selling all-flash storage, according to IDC2. The software upgrade will enable petabyte-scale configurations, on-demand non-disruptive cluster expansion, native replication, and up to 33 percent more performance to help enterprises deliver better support for hybrid-cloud and private-cloud storage services, with scale-out storage consolidation across all workloads.

With XtremIO 4.0, customers can transform their data centers by leveraging the unique combination of workload acceleration, consolidation, and agility to enable true consolidation of multiple mixed Tier 1 and Tier 2 workloads. To realize this new functionality, the storage network plays a vital role in enabling highly reliable, fast throughput for applications such as real-time analytics, database lifecycle acceleration, SAP® landscape consolidation, private/hybrid clouds, enterprise-wide VDI, messaging, collaboration, and future-proofed Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) for healthcare.

“Legacy storage networks weren’t designed for all-flash arrays and can create bottlenecks that will not maximize the full capabilities of the XtremIO 4.0 storage,” said Jack Rondoni, vice president, storage networking, at Brocade. “Brocade storage fabrics perfectly complement XtremIO storage by unleashing the performance and availability required to address stringent SLAs for critical Fibre Channel and IP storage workloads.”

Brocade storage networking technologies provide a resilient, agile, and easily deployed foundation between servers and XtremIO storage that eliminates bottlenecks for high-transaction, mixed workloads for all-flash arrays.

“EMC Connectrix Gen 5 Fibre Channel and IP storage networking solutions, based on Brocade storage fabric technologies, have become a bedrock for XtremIO customers for better enabling the new wave of consolidated database, analytics, private/hybrid cloud, VDI, and business application workloads,” said Josh Goldstein, Vice President, Marketing and Product Management, XtremIO, EMC Corporation. “This allows us to meet our customers’ new network requirements for availability, agility, scalability, quality of service, ease-of-deployment. and end-to-end management and monitoring.”

Product and Technology Details

Brocade Gen 5 Directors and Switches for Fibre Channel Storage

• Consolidate mission-critical workloads with predictable low latency
• Accelerate operations with twice the IOPs for faster processing
• Deliver better manageability and reduce common networking problems

Brocade VDX® 6740 Switch for IP Storage

• Deliver predictable performance and unmatched resiliency for business-critical applications
• Provision network capacity with minimal intervention and virtually no learning curve
• Provide storage-class resiliency with non-disruptive failover after a path or link failure

Brocade 7840 Extension Switch for Fibre Channel and IP Storage
• Move more data to meet recovery objectives for Fibre Channel and IP storage
• Encrypt data flows over distance with no performance penalty
• Maximize utilization of WAN links through protocol optimization technology

Brocade Fabric Vision™ Technology for Fibre Channel and IP Storage

• Simplify monitoring with predefined policies, rules, and actions
• Increase availability through early detection and recovery from errors
• Improve OpEx savings through faster troubleshooting and automated actions

Brocade Network Advisor for Fibre Channel and IP Storage

• Create dashboard views that display the most relevant and critical storage network metrics
• See real-time and historical event data, and quickly perform root-cause analysis
• View statistics on time-based graphs and use dashboard playback to correlate trends

Pricing and Availability

The Connectrix VDX-6740B is available now from EMC Corporation and its global network of channel partners. Other elements of the EMC Connectrix IP portfolio will be available next quarter. For pricing information, please contact EMC at emc.com.

1Valdis Filks, Joseph Unsworth, Arun Chandrasekaran, “Critical Capabilities for Solid-State Arrays,” Gartner, Aug. 29, 2014, pg. 2

2Eric Burgener, Iris Feng, Jeff Janukowicz Eric Sheppard, Natalya Yezhkova, “Worldwide All-Flash Array and Hybrid Flash Array 2014–2018 Forecast and 1H14 Vendor Shares,” IDC, pg. 4