NetApp Adds Brocade Blades

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Network Appliance, Inc. (NASDAQ:NTAP - News), a leader in advanced networked storage solutions, today announced the worldwide availability of two new Brocade Director blades: the 48-port 4Gbit/sec port blade and the FR4-18i router blade, both compatible with the Brocade 48000 Director. These offerings help meet the flexibility and investment protection needs of demanding storage area network (SAN) deployments and strengthen and extend the overall NetApp SAN portfolio.

The Brocade 48000 Director, combined with the new 48-port blade, allows NetApp customers to scale non-disruptively up to as many as 384 concurrently active 4Gbit/sec full-duplex ports in a single domain, providing higher availability, reliability, and scalability. Increasing SAN connectivity options and improving resource utilization, the Brocade FR4-18i router blade enables customers to achieve a performance-enhanced implementation of Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) that delivers the industry-best throughput for transmitting SAN data over long-distance IP networks.

"Brocade has a long working relationship with NetApp to provide solutions that help customers consolidate and simplify their SANs," said Tom Buiocchi, Brocade vice president of Marketing. "The seamless scalability and best value for performance SANs that the NetApp FAS storage systems provides, especially the new FAS3070, complements the higher port count and performance-optimized routing blades of the Brocade 48000."

"NetApp is the fastest-growing FC SAN vendor in the market today and we continue to add to our FC SAN portfolio, enabling customers to consolidate their large-scale data center environments and achieve optimal performance," said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Products and Partners at Network Appliance.

Network Appliance Inc.