Brocade and Emulex collaborate on Gen 6 Fibre Channel

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 optimised 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 virtualised data centres 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, optimise 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 virtualisation, 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.”

“Brocade and Emulex are continuing to collaborate on innovative products to meet the needs of our mutual customers,” said Jack Rondoni, vice president of product management at Brocade. “Customers clearly value the work we have done to integrate ClearLink with Emulex LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs and are looking to Emulex and Brocade for continued innovation, and this roadmap alignment ensures that we will meet their needs.”
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 centre.