Broadcom Inc. has unveiled new NVMe and automation capabilities and the industry’s highest-density Brocade® Gen 6 switch and port blade, the Brocade G630 switch and Brocade FC32-64 port blade for the Brocade X6 director.
These new Gen 6 Fibre Channel platforms are purpose-built for flash storage to accelerate business operations, respond to dynamic demands, and eliminate complexity.
The all-flash data center is here and the next wave of storage innovation is rapidly approaching. Next-generation NVMe storage will dramatically accelerate flash, however it will expose infrastructure limitations. The network will become the new bottleneck and enterprises need to re-evaluate their existing SANs. Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel is purpose-built to handle the low-latency and monitoring requirements for NVMe storage. New software optimization reduces latency by nearly 15% for Gen 6 platforms and enhanced integrated network sensors provide new insight into network health and performance of NVMe traffic.
The rapid pace of innovation in the data center is increasing the complexity of managing the infrastructure. More time is spent on deployment, configuration, and troubleshooting tasks to maintain service-level agreements and keep up with demands. Brocade automation is powerful for DevOps, simple with Ansible, and open for communities. It leverages open-source technology to automate and orchestrate repetitive tasks, enable IT organizations to significantly improve their efficiency, and decrease the risk of operational mistakes.
“Broadcom is modernizing Fibre Channel and developing innovative capabilities to enable our customers to take advantage of disruptive storage technology like NVMe and automation,” said Jack Rondoni, senior vice president and general manager, Brocade Storage Networking division at Broadcom. “The all-flash data center is a reality today and NVMe storage is rapidly approaching. Our focus is to innovate and develop industry-leading products and technologies that simplify storage networking and adapt to the evolving IT landscape.”
“As datacenters transition to the latest NVMe-based flash technologies, storage network infrastructure upgrades will be required to maintain scalability growth,” said Eric Burgener, research vice president in Storage at IDC. “High density Gen 6 Fibre Channel technology like Broadcom’s new family of Brocade blade, switch and director products provide that simple growth path for the large installed base of enterprise-class storage networking.”
With more than 20 years of storage networking experience, Broadcom understands the nuances that go into infrastructure management and what tasks can benefit from Brocade automation. By introducing REST APIs directly into Brocade switch and management products, Broadcom offers a broad range of choices to enable any SAN management solution. IT organizations that couple robust data collecting capabilities with Brocade automation and orchestration tools (such as Ansible) gain the ability to automate configuration tasks and the visibility to monitor and detect any performance or health changes.
“The Emulex Connectivity Division is excited to support these new innovations focused on increasing the performance and manageability of enterprise storage networking. Combining the new capabilities in the Brocade switches with our family of Emulex Gen 6 Fibre Channel HBAs will offer customers a solution that delivers the low latency and high bandwidth required for modern data centers,”
said, Jeff Hoogenboom, Vice President and General Manager, Emulex Connectivity Division, Broadcom.
“As we accelerate digital transformation projects for customers with ETERNUS all-flash storage, it’s important to make sure that entire infrastructures have the end-to-end data throughput capacity. That’s why we are partnering with Broadcom to offer the full Gen 6 Fibre Channel networking, including the new Brocade G630 switch. This provides the high performance needed for NVMe-ready infrastructures and means that customers can accelerate their transformation without being stuck in the slow lane,” said, Olivier Delachapelle, Head of Category Management, Data Center Products, Fujitsu EMEIA.
“Broadcom’s NVMe-ready, new high-density Fibre Channel SAN solutions with advanced automation capabilities are key for today’s modern data center. They perfectly complement the performance of Huawei’s All-Flash Storage System and intelligent storage management for mission critical enterprise businesses. The new enhanced capabilities will meet the dynamic demands and help increase innovation and productivity of our customers,” explained, Meng Guangbin, President of Huawei Storage Product Line, Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.
