Brocade has announced a set of innovative HP-branded Brocade 8 Gbps Fibre Channel data center and server connectivity products and a virtualization solution bundle. The new offerings extend the Brocade storage area network (SAN) and server connectivity portfolio delivered by HP. The solutions, which work with HP's industry-leading BladeSystem platform, help provide thousands of data center customers globally with highly scalable and reliable access to data in mission-critical environments. Brocade also announced that the companies have achieved a record-breaking milestone by shipping over 7 million HP StorageWorks B-series Fibre Channel ports to date.

"Over the past decade, Brocade and HP have worked strategically to provide our customers with industry-leading, open and standards-based storage networking solutions to help ensure seamless interoperability in heterogeneous environments," said Doug Ingraham, vice president of data center product management at Brocade. "The remarkable achievement of shipping over 7 million Fibre Channel SAN ports is a testament that our customers rely on Brocade and HP to provide the most reliable, highest-performance and energy-efficient networks in the most demanding, and increasingly virtualized, environments."

The new 8 Gbps Fibre Channel products and virtualization solution bundle announced today extend the broad portfolio of Brocade storage networking and server connectivity solutions that HP already offers. The new solutions include:

-- The Brocade 804 8 Gbps Fibre Channel HBA for HP c-Class BladeSystem: This new 8 Gbps Fibre Channel mezzanine card offers high-performance connectivity, extends fabric services to the server and applications and integrates seamlessly with management software such as HP StorageWorks Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM). The new Fibre Channel mezzanine card supports Server Application Optimization (SAO) to extend data center fabric technologies to the server infrastructure, thereby optimizing overall application performance and virtual machine scalability. The new mezzanine card also provides storage connections for all HP ProLiant server blades and is compatible with the 8 Gbps Brocade SAN switch, as well as HP's Virtual Connect Fibre Channel modules.

-- The HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 Modular Smart Array (MSA) Virtualization SAN Starter Kit: This new Brocade and HP end-to-end 8 Gbps Fibre Channel solution was designed to address the growing need for server and storage administrators to deliver comprehensive storage, virtualization and management capabilities across their network infrastructures. The bundle consists of an 8 Gbps P2000 G3 FC MSA storage array, six 8 Gbps HP StorageWorks B-series host bus adapters (HBAs), two 8 Gbps HP StorageWorks B-series Fibre Channel switches, as well as two Brocade-based software licenses per switch that enable SAO and Brocade Adaptive Networking.

-- The HP StorageWorks B-series Data Center SAN Director 64-port 8 Gbps Fibre Channel Blade: This recently announced 64-port 8 Gbps blade is the industry's highest-density, highest-performance Fibre Channel blade. The blade increases port density by more than 33 percent to an industry-leading 512 ports per chassis and up to 1536 ports in a three-chassis configuration. This increased performance and capacity will allow customers to build next-generation SANs and support the growing demands of server virtualization.

"Clients are looking to increase efficiency in the data center by virtualizing storage, server and networking resources," said Tom Joyce, vice president, Marketing, StorageWorks Division, HP. "HP StorageWorks and HP BladeSystem solutions coupled with Brocade 8 Gbps Fibre Channel products help organizations improve performance by creating an integrated, scalable and virtualized IT environment."

Availability

The new solutions are currently available and are being demonstrated at HP Tech Forum in Las Vegas this week in the Brocade booth.