Brocade unveils new switching platform

NEW DELHI, INDIA:Brocade announced the introduction of the Brocade DCX-4S Backbone, a multi-purpose core and edge network switching platform designed to facilitate server, storage area network (SAN), and data center consolidation while helping to reduce infrastructure and administrative costs for IT environments.

Following the introduction of the 384-port 8Gbit/sec Brocade DCX Backbone in 2008, the new Brocade DCX-4S Backbone scales to 192 ports at up to full 8Gbit/sec speed through its four modular blade slots and leverages the same breakthrough technology as the larger model to deliver industry-leading performance, scalability, and energy efficiency.

The Brocade DCX Backbone family was designed to address the data growth and application demands of evolving enterprise data centers.

“Leveraging the DCX Backbone portfolio is essential to the evolution of our data center architecture which will allow us to achieve new levels of performance and energy efficiency while ensuring the ability to continuously implement advanced features and functionality to leap-frog our competition,” stated Gary Oberg, VP—Technical Operations at Applied Discovery, a provider of end-to-end e-discovery solutions.

The Brocade DCX-4S offers flexible deployment and investment protection in both new and existing storage networks. For example, it can be deployed as a lower-cost core backbone solution in mid-size enterprise network environments that do not require the throughput and port density of the larger Brocade DCX Backbone.

Large enterprise customers can also implement the Brocade DCX-4S at the network edge to provide complete and highly cost-effective backbone-class capabilities throughout their data centers. The Brocade DCX-4S can also connect natively to Brocade B-Series and M-Series network environments without disruption.

The DCX-4S leverages the newly available Brocade Fabric OS (FOS) 6.2 release, including a new Virtual Fabrics capability that enables the logical partitioning of a physical SAN into logical fabrics.

The Brocade DCX-4S also offers integration with several key management products, including the HP StorageWorks Secure Key Manager, and supports advanced features such as fabric-wide encryption for data-at-rest for disk and tape. In addition, the Brocade DCX-4S provides a full suite of Adaptive Networking features that help optimize fabric behavior and help ensure ample bandwidth for critical applications.

To enable network convergence at the server edge, the Brocade DCX-4S utilizes a multi-protocol architecture that is future-built to support emerging Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) by simply adding a blade at any time that is right for the custome