Brocade unveils SAN products for SMB

BANGALORE: Brocade Communications Systems, the provider of infrastructure solutions for Storage Area Networks (SANs) has unveiled a broad portfolio of SilkWorm series of products, which will reduce the complexity of SANs for small and medium businesses and departments within large enterprises.

The products will be available through OEMs and system integrators whom Brocade has been partnering with, since its entry in India in 2001. Companies like HP, IBM, EMC, Wipro will bundle Brocade with their products.

Among other products, SilkWorm 3250 and SilkWorm 3850 deliver low cost 8-port and 16-port SAN switches specifically targeted at entry level and mid-size organizations. Users will be able to easily grow and scale their SAN switches as needed and accept software upgrades without interrupting the critical flow of data that supports their businesses.

The two switches allow SAN users to start small and easily upgrade to support large fabrics and more advanced features such as Brocade’s trunking, performance monitoring and fabric security capabilities. The company claims that these switches compete equally with enterprise-class switches in terms of performance and reliability.

"The new Brocade SAN switches fulfill several key-end user requirements. Interoperability is what customer feels happy about Brocade products," said Tom Buiocchi, VP-Marketing, Brocade. "We are committed to help bring the benefits of SAN to first-time SAN customers by providing breakthroughs in price, scalability and simplicity," he added.

"We also continue to enhance Brocade education programs for both end-user and reseller organizations. Programs like Brocade Connect, the virtual class room, web based training and SAN certification are focused to expand SAN knowledge in the end-user community," he informed.

The company also announced the Multiprotocol Router and Mutiprotocol SAN Routing Services. These services provide new options for consolidating SAN island and extending SAN benefits over multiple networks, to large SAN sizes, and across longer distances.

"By integrating multiple services in a central platform, the Multiprotocol helps provide a flexible foundation for implementing a utility computing infrastructure and efficient Information Lifecycle Management within SAN environment," said Deb Dutta, MD, APAC, Brocade.

CIOL Bureau