Headquartered in San Jose, California, Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD) with a market cap of 3.22B USD is a provider of networking solutions built for consolidation, virtualization, and cloud computing. This includes open, virtual, and efficient networking solutions in areas like - storage networking, data center & Ethernet fabric routing, software networking (including SDN and NFV) and campus networking.

The newest and most exciting storage advancement today is flash-based storage. The unprecedented speed and rapidly increasing cost-effectiveness of flash-based products are dramatically accelerating data center transformation. Ethernet storage not only helps customers maximize the ROI of existing investments, it also dramatically simplifies storage management. With the scalability to meet business and storage requirements, Ethernet can solve the challenges of rapid data growth by enabling a cost effective storage solution that can support deployment and management as the storage network evolves.

Software-defined storage (SDS) is the logical next step of the software defined data center. By employing SDS, organizations are able to separate and abstract storage elements, as well as combine storage elements and capabilities providing storage solutions/services. Data deduplication will help reduce the time required to back up all the data and is relevant to large organizations that have similar kind of data being handled in various physical storage devices.

Fibre Channel would be able to address many of the new and evolving storage-related requirements around hyper-scale, distance connectivity (metro and geo), operational simplicity, and performance. Fibre Channel is a viable and vibrant storage networking technology that has demonstrated its value over time, and is now the most widely deployed storage network infrastructure for virtualization, Cloud, and mission-critical applications. Fibre Channel is the most widely deployed storage networking infrastructure for server and storage virtualization. In fact, Fibre Channel has been an integral part of every wave of storage advancement in the data center. Fibre Channel drives the world's economies with the most trusted and widely deployed network infrastructure for storage. Thirty billion transactions go through Fibre Channel each day and 96 percent of the world's banks, airlines and retailers rely on Fibre Channel. Brocade’s purpose-built extension solutions help address the growing replication and backup needs driven by increasing traffic between data centers, virtualized application workloads, and business continuity requirements. In the storage networking realm, Fibre Channel is the clear choice for a mission-critical, high-performance, low-latency, highly reliable SAN fabric. FC may lack some reusability for networking purposes other than storage, and require in-house expertise, but the fact that FC was purpose-built for data storage, doesn't drop data packets and offers Linux drivers that have been around for more than a decade. Fibre Channel has long been a prime choice for enterprises in need of a high-speed interconnect for SANs.

Importance of Network in Storage

Storage networking is the practice of linking together storage devices and connecting them to other IT networks. Storage networks provide a centralized repository for digital data that can be accessed by many users, and they use high-speed connections to provide fast performance. The benefits of storage networking can include improved performance, reliability and availability. It can enable greater collaboration among workers, and it can simplify some IT management tasks. Storage networks also make it easier to back up data for compliance and disaster recovery purposes. In addition, they can free up valuable server CPU cycles for more important tasks. And although setting up a storage network can be costly, in some cases, it can reduce overall storage costs.IP Storage network delivers predictable performance, provides security for storage data flows between data centers, contains failure domains, and maximizes uptime. These attributes are essential for managing growth, mitigating risk, and reducing costs. Fibre Channel which is the most trusted and widely deployed purpose-built network infrastructure for storage.

Gen6 is the next generation Fibre Channel technology that will enable organizations to address performance, reliability and scalability requirements for hyper scale virtualization, new data center architectures and next-generation storage technologies. Gen6 Fibre Channel is especially significant for new technology such as flash-based storage, which is accelerating the transformation of the data center. Gen6 FC shatters application performance barriers and simplifies scale-out network architectures—in an enviably small footprint. And with built-in instrumentation, you gain greater insight and control to reduce cost, management complexity, and risk. As organizations redesign their data centers with flash storage to optimize application performance, they require networks that deliver low-latency, high capacity bandwidth and reliability. Today, 70 to 80 percent of flash array storage systems are already deployed with Fibre Channel. Tomorrow, next-generation flash storage based on Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) will seamlessly integrate with current and future Gen6 Fibre Channel networks. Gen6 Fibre Channel complements them all by providing the unmatched reliability, performance, scalability, and security needed to deliver always-on business operations.