Brocade to Outline Its Strategy

Brocade will affirm the strength and direction of its core technologies and chart its plans and strategies for helping customers migrate to next-generation data center technologies at an event it will hold at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York in front of investors, financial and industry analysts, media and customers.

The event is the backdrop for Brocade to discuss and detail the company’s current and future technology, product and service plans for its four primary businesses: Fibre Channel-based storage area network (SAN) connectivity, server connectivity, file-based data consolidation and management, and professional services and support.

Brocade will also present its vision and a pragmatic timeline of the evolution to the next-generation data center networks. Brocade will outline an application-centric vision of the data center infrastructure, with intelligent, purpose-built networks that rationally and non disruptively integrate new technologies such as Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE). This discussion will reiterate and extend the vision Brocade introduced with the Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture and the DCX Backbone platform, and will highlight the advantages over alternative strategies.

Brocade is an industry leader in developing technologies to drive tomorrow’s data centers and we realize that any migration of global, information-based systems needs to be carefully plotted, tested and evaluated before being put into production, said Mike Klayko, CEO of Brocade. We understand our customers’ concerns in this area which is why our Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture and DCX Backbone platform are designed to enable customers to migrate to newer technologies on their own timetables while continuing to enjoy the benefits of the most innovative, high-performance data center fabric technologies available today.

Recent research from TheInfoPro, an independent research network for the IT industry, supports Brocade’s views that while customers are aware of these developing technologies, their plans are to carefully assess and evaluate the impact of the new standards and technologies prior to deploying them into production data center environments. TheInfoPro polled storage and networking users from 152 Fortune 1000 companies from various industries. On average, each of these organizations manages 1.5 terabyte of data. Of the respondents, 84 percent said they have no immediate plans to deploy FCoE and another 9 percent said it was in their long-term plans. Comparatively, 77 percent of these overall respondents said that they were already using or were evaluating Fibre Channel technology.

Ongoing Commitment to Fibre Channel Innovation
In alignment with these customer plans, Brocade will also use the Technology Day to outline its continued investment and on-going commitment to lead the market in delivering innovative Fibre Channel solutions. For example, Brocade will discuss its first-to-market success in the SAN switching industry with 8-gigabit per second (gbps) solutions, giving it considerable first-mover’s advantage. The latest available research from the Dell’Oro Group, which tracks market information for the SAN switching industry, confirmed this by showing that Brocade gained nearly 5.5 points of market share in the high-end — or the modular switch — segment versus competitors in the most recent reported quarter. Rapid customer adoption of the new 8-gbps Brocade DCX Backbone and DCF architecture played a significant role in this success, Brocade reported in a related press release.

Brocade will also discuss its commitment to future innovation such as driving and supporting 16-gbps Fibre Channel, the next phase in this technology’s roadmap expected by 2011. As with previous Fibre Channel advancements, the higher performance through 16-gbps will help customers further address their data center growth and consolidation needs while continuing to drive down complexity and operating costs through increased efficiencies.

"Fibre Channel is here to stay. And from Brocade, you will see us delivering more — not less — in terms of capabilities, innovation and solutions," said Martin Skagen, Chief Technology Officer of Brocade’s Data Center Infrastructure Division. "We believe this will help us maintain and grow our leadership position in data center server-to-storage networking for the next several years."

Outlining Innovation and Realistic Expectations for FCoE, CEE
Brocade will also present its views on the likely evolutionary paths and customer adoption trends for emerging data center technologies, namely FCoE and CEE. Brocade believes that these technologies are likely to develop and be adopted by customers incrementally, to extend their existing networks, with greatest impact initially at the server-edge. The company will point out that through this progression FCoE is likely to increase demand for Fibre Channel technologies by enabling customers to attach more servers to networked storage.

Brocade will further outline that it expects that the FCoE and CEE standards will begin to be ratified in 2009 with early adoption of standards-compliant products to follow shortly afterwards. Brocade expects that mainstream, large-scale deployments of FCoE and CEE are not likely to occur until at least 2010. In preparation for this evolutionary path, Brocade is currently developing, and will soon begin testing solutions based on these new technologies.

Future FCoE- and CEE- based solutions that the company will discuss at Technology Day include:

• FCoE and CEE module options for the DCX Backbone platform, which further expands the role and performance of data center networks;
• A 10-gbps FCoE switch enabling efficient server I/O consolidation as a top of rack model or as an edge switch to an existing storage network;
• Next-generation 10-gbps FCoE server adapters for full-performance server I/O consolidation and ease-of-management. These next-gen adapters will extend Brocade’s existing portfolio of 4- and 8-gbps Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs). Brocade announced the general availability of these new HBAs through global channel partners.

Other technology developments to be discussed include:

• Brocade’s plans to extend its file management solutions portfolio to support content management systems such as Microsoft SharePoint and to deliver unified file management capabilities for both file server and web-portal based environments;
• Broadening of Brocade’s professional services capabilities to meet the evolving requirements of a virtualized data center that will help customers and partners accelerate and manage their new technology deployments.

"Our message to this audience will be simple: Brocade continues to execute well on all technology and product fronts in our evolution to become a larger, more strategic enabler of data center solutions," said Tom Buiocchi, Brocade’s Vice President of Worldwide Marketing. "Key to our ongoing leadership and growing momentum is that we continue to focus and innovate in our core technologies but with an eye and a sensible plan toward the migration to the next-generation data center."

Click here to see the webcast event (after registration):
Brocade Technology Day: For Analysts and Investors