Brocade Achieves Major Milestone With Server Qualification Of 10 Gigabit Ethernet CNAs And Fibre Channel HBAs

SAN JOSE, Calif. (BUSINESS WIRE) Brocade today announced that the best-in-class Brocade 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) dual-port Converged Network Adapters (CNAs) and its 8Gbps Fibre Channel (FC) Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) have been successfully qualified and are available from Dell, offering significant performance, virtualization, management and pricing advantages over competing products.

Today's announcement builds on the joint strategy of offering Dell customers the full breadth of computing, networking and storage solutions through Dell's global sales organization. The availability of Brocade 815/825 FC HBAs and Brocade 1020 CNAs will complement Dell's existing portfolio of Brocade storage networking solutions, enabling customers to deploy an end-to-end storage networking architecture from server to storage. Brocade HBAs and CNAs are factory-installed during the Dell server build process, allowing customers to easily select and deploy Brocade technologies and products.

"Today's announcement extends Brocade's ability to deliver non-stop networking solutions that drive server and storage virtualization more broadly across the data center," said Doug Ingraham, vice president of data center products at Brocade. "As partners, Brocade and Dell offer customers end-to-end computing, networking and storage solutions through Dell's global sales organization."

"Dell's offering of Brocade server adapters is a significant milestone in our partnership," said Brian Payne, director, server platform management at Dell. "Brocade 1020 CNA NICs extend advanced LAN/SAN fabric functionality to Dell servers, providing the I/O performance, unified management and application/VM-aware networking required to enable true convergence, virtual data centers and cloud architectures."

The Brocade 815 (single port) and 825 (dual port) 8 Gbps FC-to-PCIe HBAs provide a new level of scalable server connectivity through unmatched hardware capabilities and unique software features. Delivering more than twice the performance of competing HBAs, Brocade FC HBAs also offer advanced features for supporting enterprise-class, end-to-end storage networking solutions.Brocade HBAs deliver unique breakthrough performance and end-to-end networking capabilities for customers implementing server virtualization as part of their data center strategy. Brocade end-to-end storage networking solutions offer unmatched server-to-storage connectivity as well as Brocade Adaptive Networking services such as true Quality of Service (QoS) from server virtual machines to storage array ports and traffic management.

The Brocade 1020 CNAs integrate 10 GbE Network Interface Card (NIC) functionality with FC technology, enabling the transport of TCP/IP and storage (iSCSI/FCoE) traffic over a single 10 GbE connection through the new Data Center Bridging (DCB) and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocols. This design provides best-in-class LAN connectivity and I/O consolidation to help reduce cost and complexity in next-generation data centers. In addition, the Brocade 1020 CNAs deliver line-rate 10 Gbps throughput and up to 1,000,000 I/Os Per Second (IOPS) on a dual-port card, increasing performance to support real-world applications such as enterprise e-mail and database applications.

The Brocade 815/825 FC HBAs and Brocade 1020 CNAs are available now from Dell. For more information, visit www.dell.com/networking.