Brocade Improves 48000

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Brocade(R) (Nasdaq: BRCD), the leading provider of networked storage solutions that help enterprises connect and manage their information, today announced more industry firsts with the addition of new performance and interoperability levels for its flagship Brocade 48000 Director. The new capabilities extend Brocade's performance leadership with the industry's first 8 Gbit/sec SAN switching capabilities, and also provide customers who own classic McDATA technology with an interoperable path to more easily grow and evolve their data center fabrics.

The Brocade 8 Gbit/sec technology doubles the bandwidth of existing high- performance SANs, enabling data centers to meet the challenge of ever-growing volumes of data, rising application access needs, and shrinking data backup windows. 8 Gbit/sec performance is especially valuable for data centers with large virtual server environments, enabling enterprises to deploy significantly more virtual machines within their existing SAN fabrics. This breakthrough also lays the foundation for enterprises that wish to reduce backup times using forthcoming LTO-5 tape drives and for mainframe environments that need additional SAN connectivity performance and capacity.

"The explosive adoption of virtualized and bladed servers is spurring the need for more scalable and robust storage connectivity solutions," said Richard Villars, Vice President, Storage Systems Research at IDC. "The planned addition of 8 Gbit/sec Fibre Channel technology to Brocade's product portfolio puts the company in a strong position to help companies deploy and expand more effectively virtualized data centers."

Brocade Communications Systems Inc.