Brocade and Emulex to Collaborate 

Emulex Corporation and Brocade, Inc. today announced a commitment to jointly develop and align the two companies' roadmaps around a new generation of advanced Gen 6 (32Gb) Fibre Channel networking solutions, enabling increased network performance, higher scalability and improved reliability for the highly virtualized data center.

Emulex and Brocade have a long history of driving industry innovation, including recently announced support for Brocade ClearLink diagnostics, which ensures the reliability and management of storage network configurations, and Emulex Gen 5 Flash Services, including ExpressLane, which provides Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities for flash/solid state disk (SSD)-based storage and Emulex CrossLink which provides in-band message passing between server nodes, delivering optimized performance using lossless, standards-based FC protocols.

Emulex and Brocade are jointly developing technology to deliver:

• Industry Leading Network Performance with Gen 6 (32Gb) FC: Emulex and Brocade will partner to develop end-to-end 32GFC-based solutions that will improve performance and scalability to support the demands of highly virtualized data centers and flash/SSD-based applications.
• Extending Fibre Channel's Industry Leading Reliability: Emulex and Brocade are delivering ClearLink, an advanced end-to-end diagnostic solution, that performs in-band tests on both Brocade Gen 5 FC switches and Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs, which can detect problems with the physical cabling and optics that could result in increased error rates and intermittent problems.
• Enabling Flash and SSD Solutions: Emulex and Brocade will partner to create solutions that highlight Emulex's innovative ExpressLane and CrossLink technology which is designed to enhance the QoS, optimize I/O performance and increase return on investment (ROI) in IT environments using fabric-based flash arrays and server-based cache.

"Emulex and Brocade have been on the leading edge of innovation in Fibre Channel for virtualization, flash/SSD and cloud applications," said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. "We are committed to the long term future of Fibre Channel, and are aggressively pursuing our Gen 6 FC roadmap. By working with Brocade, we will continue to be leaders in this strategic market, just as we have been in the Gen 5 FC market transition."

Emulex also announced today that it has certified its recently announced OneConnect OCe14000 family of 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet Network Adapters and Converged Network Adapters with Brocade's flagship VDX Ethernet Fabric switches for the modern data center.