A slew of vendors plan to unveil products this week, many at the Storage World Conference (SWC) starting tomorrow in Long Beach, California.
Brocade plans to announce a major OEM deal with Nortel built around wide area file services (WAFS) tomorrow. At the heart of the deal is WAFS technology developed by Tacit Networks, a long-standing Brocade partner, which is now part of Packeteer. (See Brocade, Packeteer Team Up.) The software will be featured in a new BCS 3000 device from Nortel, which is aimed at firms looking to connect their data centers and branch offices.
"[Major corporations] were talking to us about the challenges they faced in the area of data center consolidation and branch office integration," explains Phil Edholm, Nortel's enterprise CTO, adding that the device can be used for WAN optimization and acceleration as well as backup.
In addition to WAFS, the BCS 3000 comes with a storage networking module devised by Nortel for Fibre Channel, Ethernet, and Ficon connectivity. The BCS 3000 is deployed behind a router in a branch office and it offers a bandwidth manager enabling users to allocate bandwidth to specific applications.
Voice and application switching features could also find their way onto the platform. According to Al Lounsbury, Nortel's senior manager for BCS 3000 product marketing: "We are currently evaluating how the product will evolve."
