Brocade: Gen 6 FC Directors for All-Flash Data Center

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. announced Gen 6 FC directors for mission-critical storage connectivity and business resiliency solutions designed for the all-flash data center.

This extends the company’s offering of innovative and widely deployed FC storage network solutions, building on the first Gen 6 FC switch that Brocade delivered in March 2016.

The new Brocade X6 director family and the SX6 extension blade for FC, FICON and IP storage replication, combined with Brocade Fabric Vision technology, enables customers to drive always-on business operations, eliminate performance bottlenecks and adapted to the requirements of digital organizations.

As organizations continue to digitize and adapt to new workloads, they need,modern storage network that supports business agility. FC fabrics are the common thread that connects organizations to their most critical applications and data. 96% of banks, insurance companies and retailers rely on FC as trusted network infrastructure for storage. Gen 6 FC provides the digital enterprise with non-stop availability and performance required for tomorrow’s hyperscale data centers.

“Legacy networks will bottleneck flash storage minimizing the performance and economic benefits of this game-changing technology,” said Jack Rondoni, VP of storage networking, Brocade. “Brocade’s Gen 6 FC solutions unleash the full value of today’s flash technology and enable tomorrow’s next-generation flash storage based on NVMe. NVMe will be the next disruptive storage technology in the data center and customers will be able to seamlessly integrate NVMe over fabrics with Brocade Gen 6 FC.”

Network automation is key to modernizing data centers. According to a global CIO survey (Global CIO Study 2015, Vanson Bourne, May 2015), 75% of respondents stated that the network is impacting their organizations’ ability to achieve business goals. The lack of network automation and integration of the network with other IT operations is the single biggest inhibitor to capitalizing on digitization.

Brocade has led the industry in automating storage networks with the industry’s first implementation of RESTful API support in Brocade Network Advisor. This complete network-lifecycle solution brings an organization’s information together into one simple, easy-to-use command-and-control application. It provides a programmable web-based interface through standard REST APIs to automate operational tasks such as zoning, scripting and reporting. In addition, standard REST APIs enable customers to use Fabric Vision technology to analyze fabric-wide health and performance. The company is also a supporter of the OpenStack storage community, contributing FC zone management to the OpenStack Cinder project.

Innovations in Brocade Gen 6 FC Enables Data Center Modernization
The Gen 6 FC portfolio combines hardware, Fabric Vision technology and integrated monitoring for storage IO and VM performance. This delivers high level of operational stability while redefining application performance for hyperscale, mission-critical storage.

New innovations in Brocade’s Gen 6 FC portfolio include:
 
Brocade X6 Director Family
The industry-first Gen 6 FC director family delivers application performance, data center-proven reliability and increased business agility to accelerate data access, adapt to evolving requirements and drive always-on business operations. The X6 directors provide up to 384 32Gb/s line rate ports and up to 32 128Gb/s UltraScale ICL connectivity ports delivering a total system bandwidth of 16Tb/s. 32Gb/s performance accelerates application response time by up to 71% over previous solution eliminating IO bottlenecks and unleashing the full performance of flash and next generation NVMe-based storage.

Brocade SX6 Extension Blade
The SX6 extension blade for FC, FICON and IP storage replication moves more data over distance faster and enhances security without compromising performance. With up to 80Gb/s application throughput per platform and line-rate encryption, the SX6 is designed for the demanding environments. This purpose-built solution delivers business resiliency at scale with 32Gb/s FC and 1/10GbE IP storage replication over 1/10/40GbE IP WAN connections to handle the growth of data traffic between data centers.

Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with IO Insight
Fabric Vision technology overcomes the traditional limitations of network monitoring by introducing IO Insight, the only integrated network sensor that provides deeper visibility into the IO performance of storage infrastructure. This enhanced visibility enables quick identification of degraded application performance at host and storage tiers reducing time to resolution. IO Insight proactively monitors IO performance and behavior to gain insight into potential issues and help maintain service levels.

Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with VM Insight
Fabric Vision technology will include VM Insight for end-to-end visibility into the storage performance of individual VMs. This feature optimizes VM performance and availability in a virtualized data center. VM Insight uses standards-based VM tagging to enable monitoring of VM-level application performance issues in a Gen 6 FC SAN. Using this information, storage administrators can establish baseline application performance and identify anomalies in order to fine-tune the infrastructure to meet service level objectives. VM Insight also enables quick correlation with other Fabric Vision metrics to identify the root cause of problems before operations are affected.

Hitachi Data Systems Corp. is shipping the Brocade Gen 6 directors, blades and switch today.

“Digital transformation enables businesses to deliver superior customer experiences. That cannot be accomplished without a modern and agile IT infrastructure that delivers information to customers faster than ever before,” said Bob Madaio, VP of infrastructure solutions marketing, HDS. “The combination of the Hitachi flash portfolio with Brocade’s Gen 6 directors, blades and switch enables businesses to transform operations and serve data to customers faster so they get what they want, when they want it.“

“These new Gen 6 FC directors from Brocade combine extremely high-density, non-blocking 32 Gbps port capacity and 128Gb/s inter-switch connectivity along with I/O performance monitoring capabilities that offer a remarkable degree of visibility into FC storage networks. The emerging, high-performance flash platforms based on NVMe over fabric will need a network environment that can reliably supply massive bandwidth and low latency as well as a new set of management tools designed to ensure consistent and dependable peak application performance,” said Steven Hill, senior research analyst, 451 Research.

“All-flash-arrays have become pervasive in today’s modern data center and for the first time in a decade, the legacy storage network has become the application performance bottleneck. Customers who want to extract the intended value and application performance out of their SSD-based storage investment need to upgrade their FC network to the new Brocade X6 Director and new servers with Emulex’s Gen 6 FC HBAs,” said Jeff Hoogenboom, GM, Emulex connectivity division, Broadcom Limited.

“Dell’s goal is to enable the Future Ready Enterprise and Brocade’s continued FC innovation is key for our joint customers in implementing scalable and always-on infrastructures. Brocade’s 32 Gbps capabilities will allow customers to utilize flash storage today and future next generation technology,” said Tom Burns, VP and GM, Dell, Inc.‘s networking and enterprise infrastructure.

“Gen 6 FC is an important upgrade to the market as we see storage transitioning to flash-based products and the need for higher speeds in the data center. Flash, which is architecturally different from traditional disk arrays from the storage industry, will benefit greatly from Gen 6 FC solutions,” said Alan Weckel, VP of SAN and data center market research, Dell’Oro Group.

“Gen 6 FC couldn’t appear at a better time. Due to continued tremendous data growth, increasing demands are being placed on IT infrastructure. The new Brocade Gen 6 FC Directors not only provide large-scale deployment of the newest speed of FC, but they provide data centers with additional insights into their I/O traffic. Our testing with databases such as SQL Server and Oracle database has shown that using Brocade Gen 6 FC switches and Emulex Gen 6 FC HBAs resulted in 3.4 times faster performance and lower latency up to 70%,” said Dennis Martin, president, Demartek.

“EMC declared 2016 ‘The Year of All Flash’ for primary storage as businesses around the world reach an inversion point and make flash their de facto choice for their data centers. EMC is leading the pack with Unity, VMAX All Flash, XtremIO and DSSD delivering spectacular performance. However, to realize the full performance benefit, the storage networking performance has to keep pace with the arrays. After all, you wouldn’t expect to hit the top speed of a Ferrari if you’re driving on an unpaved dirt road. The introduction of Brocade’s 32Gb/s directors extends EMC’s 32Gb/s offering to our enterprise customers, enabling them to lay the network foundations for their flash-fueled futures,” said Peter Smails, VP, product marketing, core technologies division, EMC Corporation.

“Updates to FC technology is a not too frequent event. Gen 6 is faster but it’s not just a matter of speeds. New features and capabilities with these new Brocade Gen 6 directors enable easier management and operations. Visibility provided by tools such as IO Insight or VM Insight enables better application management which is ultimately what matters to IT organizations,” said Dan Conde, analyst, Enterprise Strategy Group.

“The need for shared storage over high performance storage networks will continue into foreseeable future with customers continuing to need greater bandwidth and lower latency. Brocade’s announcement of Gen 6 FC directors and blade and support for NVMe over Fabric answers those two needs, needs that are made even more real by deployment of all-flash storage,” said Randy Kerns, senior strategist, Evaluator Group.

“Using our digital business platform, MetaArc, Fujitsu supports customers with the technologies, tools, services and partnerships that help them achieve the agile and robust information and communications technology that best suits their needs to modernize on a global scale. We look forward to our continued partnership with Brocade to deliver storage networking connectivity solutions, such as Gen 6 FC, which enable customers to make this digital transformation,” said Kazuhiko Endo, SVP, head of data center platform business unit, Fujitsu Limited.

“In the era of data explosion, the launch of Brocade Gen 6 FC directors means data exchange will be largely accelerated, which is crucial to enhancing the efficiency of enterprises’ data centers. Brocade and Huawei have been jointly innovating and developing all-flash and active-active storage solutions. We will continuously strengthen our collaboration on storage network convergence and intelligent operation and maintenance and devote reliable, efficient and intelligent IT solutions to customers,” said Zhao Chunhui, VP, storage product line, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

“For more than 16 years, Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Brocade have delivered unparalleled value to our joint customers, providing them with comprehensive storage networking solutions with unmatched reliability, manageability and scalability. The launch of the new Gen 6 FC solutions demonstrates HPE and Brocade’s continued innovations to deliver customers the most reliable and highest performing data center storage networks,” said Neeraj Gokhale, VP of storage marketing, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP.

“FC technology continues to play an important role in the data center, providing lossless and secure data transmission maintaining a very loyal user community. New applications and the next generation of servers – with additional CPU cores and higher speed connectivity, coupled with adoption of SSD storage – is driving the need for higher performance storage networking. The introduction of Gen 6 FC technology is an important and timely event advancing the storage networking market and also preparing for the arrival of NVMe-based flash storage which will demand additional storage network bandwidth,” said Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., senior research director for data center, cloud and SDN, IHS Technology.