Brocade, a provider of networked storage solutions announced new performance and interoperability levels for its flagship Brocade 48000 Director. The new capabilities extend Brocade’s performance leadership with the industry’s first 8 Gbit/sec SAN switching capabilities, and also provide customers who own classic McDATA technology with an interoperable path to more easily grow and evolve their data center fabrics.

The Brocade 8 Gbit/sec technology doubles the bandwidth of existing high-performance SANs, enabling data centers to meet the challenge of ever-growing volumes of data, rising application access needs, and shrinking data backup windows. 8 Gbit/sec performance is especially valuable for data centers with large virtual server environments, enabling enterprises to deploy significantly more virtual machines within their existing SAN fabrics. This breakthrough also lays the foundation for enterprises that wish to reduce backup times using forthcoming LTO-5 tape drives and for mainframe environments that need additional SAN connectivity performance and capacity.

The explosive adoption of virtualised and bladed servers is spurring the need for more scalable and robust storage connectivity solutions,” said Richard Villars, vice president, storage systems research at IDC. He also mentioned that the addition of 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel technology will enable Brocade to help companies deploy and expand more effectively virtualised data centers.

In addition to increased performance, the Brocade 48000 delivers native interoperability for enterprise data centers worldwide that depend on classic McDATA technology. Native interoperability enables customers to connect Brocade 48000 Directors directly to Brocade M6140 and Brocade Mi10K Directors as well as classic McDATA switches. As a result, customers can seamlessly expand, connect, and fully leverage their existing data center fabric investments using the Brocade 48000.