News

posted on 26 June 2008 17:39

Brocade has introduced a second host bus adapter (HBA) generation with both 8Gbit/s and 4Gbit/s product, answering competitor claims about slow performance and missing 4Gbit/s connectivity product.

It is positioning these HBAs as a key component in its virtualised data centre fabric vision and promises they will deliver better connectivity to servers, particularly virtualized servers, because of their integration with Brocade core fabric products.

Brocade puts it like this: 'as data centres become increasingly virtualised, customers will require unified touch points throughout the data centre infrastructure to deliver and manage advanced storage services. Brocade server connectivity products are thus a key element in building uniform infrastructures that have the advantage of end-to-end consistency in architecture to support the new data centre services.'

The new HBAs have been designed to deliver twice the throughput of competing products.

The adapters also offer new Quality of Service (QoS), Data Mobility and Data Encryption features that help ensure faster and more secure communications between virtual servers and storage. They are available in both 8Gbit/s (the Brocade 815/825) and 4Gbit/s models (the Brocade 415/425), and Brocade says they are designed to support servers in the following environments:

- Microsoft Windows 2003 and 2008 including Standard, Enterprise and Datacentre versions;
- Enterprise Linux servers including Novell SUSE and others;
- Enterprise Unix servers including Sun Solaris and others;
- VMWare environments.

The new HBAs are available through a network of Brocade distributors and resellers including Arrow, Avnet, Bell Micro, Info-X and Tech Data, but not through any OEMS.

Gary Gammon, Enterprise Marketing VP for Bell Micro, said: “Brocade’s HBAs with expanded fabric services and management software coupled with their large installed base of Fibre Channel fabric creates greater opportunity for Bell Micro to deliver superior end-to-end solutions to our partners and customers.”

^{[Paul Roberts, news editor.]}