Brocade to Exhibit Solid State Ready Program at VMworld
Brocade today announced it has advanced its leadership in fabric-based networking by developing new solutions testing initiatives to extend support for the Brocade Solid State Ready program. The program is designed for solid-state storage array vendors to help ensure their enterprise customers experience seamless interoperability and optimum performance when deploying all-flash and hybrid arrays to support software-defined data centers running VMware and other mission-critical applications on Brocade fabrics.
In moving to a software-defined data center where business-critical applications operate in highly virtualized environments, organizations now demand more from their storage and networks. In addition to server virtualization, I/O-intensive workloads -- such as virtual desktop infrastructures, data warehousing, and online transactional processing -- are requiring IT organizations to re-evaluate their storage strategies. This has led to exponential growth in the deployment of solid-state storage technologies, which will be as disruptive in the data center as server virtualization was.
To support this growing trend, Brocade introduced the Solid State Ready program earlier this year and has now extended its scope to include Ethernet fabrics, solutions testing, and market development investments such as technical and sales support, education, marketing, and awareness activities. These efforts will ensure seamless deployment and optimum performance of solid-state storage and VMware technologies in Brocade Fibre Channel and Ethernet fabrics. Program participants include Fujitsu America Inc., Hitachi Data Systems, HP, NetApp, Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, Saratoga Speed, SolidFire, Skyera, Tegile Systems and Violin Memory.
At VMworld (Booth 1513), Brocade will showcase its Solid State Ready program and demonstrate partner solutions. Brocade will also stage several in-booth theater presentations featuring program partners showing attendees best practices and other tips for deploying all-flash and hybrid array-based solutions within their VMware environments. Brocade will also demonstrate how organizations using solid-state storage can better enable software-defined data centers by leveraging the integration of Brocade Fabric Vision™ technology with VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite and VMware Log Insight. This approach provides greater visibility and actionable intelligence to help customers proactively ensure that service levels are met, optimize resource usage, and verify configuration compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.
"All-flash storage and high-performance networks have become essential elements in creating and operating software-defined data centers," said Sajai Krishnan, vice president, Product Marketing, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. "We are excited that the Brocade Solid State Ready program will allow enterprises to realize the benefits of the collaborative efforts of VMware and Brocade in providing enhanced visibility, simplified management, rapid root-cause detection and optimal performance for workloads running in virtual environments."
"We are now making it easier for enterprises to deploy high-performance, flash-enhanced storage as complete solutions to support highly virtualized cloud environments," said Jack Rondoni, Vice President, Storage Networking, at Brocade. "As a result, today's organizations can be confident that Brocade Solid State Ready solutions meet the same rigorous quality standards that have made Brocade the industry leader in SAN and Ethernet fabrics."
The Solid State Ready program provides joint testing for Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NAS-based all-flash and hybrid storage arrays across multiple fabrics, heterogeneous servers, NICs, CNAs, and HBAs in Brocade environments. It also provides a holistic approach to quality that leverages the expertise, proven testing methodologies, and tools from engineering teams across Brocade to deliver the highest quality solutions. To date, Nimble Storage, Pure Storage, and Tegile Systems have completed solutions testing, with other solutions in process for completion in the near future.
