Brocade has announced that it is working with Microsoft to bring greater application mobility and higher levels of reliability to datacentres deploying Microsoft's System Centre Virtual Machine Manager 2007. When used together in a virtual server environment running Microsoft Virtual Server 2005, Brocade Access Gateway technology and System Centre Virtual Machine Manager claim to optimise and simplify the often complex relationship between server and storage connectivity in the datacentre.

Key Brocade Storage Area Network (SAN) products support Access Gateway, an N_Port ID Virtualisation (NPIV)-based technology that enables multiple virtual servers to share and connect over a single physical interface. Microsoft System Centre Virtual Machine Manager uses these Brocade-enabled SAN connections for easier application mobility, increased availability, and greater system reliability.

Virtualisation is fundamentally changing the datacentre," said Tom Buiocchi, Brocade vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "Brocade has partnered with Microsoft to deliver optimised blade server and server virtualisation solutions that improve asset utilisation in evolving datacentres."

According to David Greschler, director of System Centre Marketing at Microsoft, "We're working with Brocade to simplify server and storage connectivity, and providing customers scalable storage infrastructure for virtualised IT environments. We look forward to partnering with Brocade on other solutions in support of System Centre systems management products."