Brocade, EMC Deliver Software-Defined Storage For Fibre Channel SANs

Brocade, the fabric networking solutions provider, has announced its Gen 5 Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) solutions are integrated with the new EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform. This approach helps eliminate datacentre cost and complexity by improving policy-based automation of EMC and non-EMC storage infrastructures, creating a modern storage architecture for future application deployments. This solution will allow more than 50,000 joint EMC and Brocade customers to immediately realise the virtualisation benefits of the new EMC ViPR software-defined storage platform within highly virtualised cloud environments.

Teams from Brocade and EMC have completed the integration of Brocade Network Advisor SAN management software into ViPR using the industry-standard Storage Management Initiative (SMI) interface. This integration enables customers with both third-party and EMC storage arrays – including the EMC VMAX, VPLEX, VNX, Atmos, and Isilon families – to take advantage of Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN solutions enhanced with Brocade Fabric Vision technology as they transform to a software-defined storage architecture with EMC ViPR. Brocade Network Advisor is sold by EMC as Connectrix Manager Converged Network Edition (CMCNE).

With Brocade technology integration, EMC Connectrix SAN customers can now utilise the EMC ViPR platform to enable existing SAN infrastructure to leverage existing storage infrastructures for traditional data center workloads, as well as provision new EMC ViPR Object Data Service and EMC ViPR HDFS Service through access to Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift for next-generation workloads. This complete spectrum of capabilities can be run against enterprise or commodity storage.

“We are really excited to collaborate with EMC to enable all Fibre Channel storage connected to Brocade switches and directors to be part of this revolutionary approach to storage automation and management,” said Jason Nolet, Vice President of Data Center Networking at Brocade. “With ViPR, Brocade FC SAN customers can transform existing heterogeneous physical storage into a simple, extensible and open virtual storage platform, a significant step towards the software-defined datacentre.”

“As a crucial component of today’s storage infrastructure we are very excited with the work we’ve done with Brocade to ensure seamless integration of the networking stack with ViPR,” said Christopher Ratcliffe, Vice President of Marketing, Advanced Software Division, EMC Corporation. “The ability to automate and define policy across the entire storage environment extends our common vision to deliver proven, simple-to-use solutions for storage networks and private clouds with unparalleled ability to transform enterprise datacentres. We look forward to continuing our long term strategic relationship to further improve the utilisation of our customers’ existing and future storage investments.”