Brocade has announced the industry’s first Gen 6 fibre channel directors for storage connectivity and business resiliency solutions designed for the all-flash data centre.

The new Brocade X6 director family and the Brocade SX6 extension blade for fibre channel, fibre connection and IP storage replication, combined with Brocade’s fabric vision technology, enable customers to drive business operations, eliminate performance bottlenecks and adapt to the requirements of digital organisations. The Brocade Gen 6 fibre channel portfolio combines innovative hardware, Brocade’s fabric vision technology and ground-breaking integrated monitoring for storage IO and virtual machine (VM) performance. It delivers the industry’s highest level of operational stability while redefining application performance for hyperscale mission-critical storage.

The key products in Brocade’s Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio include:

  • Brocade X6 director family: The industry-first Gen 6 fibre channel director family delivers breakthrough application performance, data centre-proven reliability and increased business agility to accelerate data access, adapt to evolving requirements and drive always-on business operations. The Brocade X6 director provides up to 384 32 Gbps line rate ports and up to 32 128 Gbps ultra-scale inter-chassis link connectivity ports delivering a total system bandwidth of 16 Tbps.
  • Brocade SX6 extension blade: The Brocade SX6 extension blade for fibre connectivity and IP storage replication transmits more data at faster rates and enhances security without compromising performance. With up to 80 Gbps application throughput per platform and line-rate encryption, the Brocade SX6 is designed for the most demanding environments. This purpose-built solution delivers business resiliency at scale with 32 Gbps fibre channel and 1/10 GbE IP storage replication over 1/10/40 GbE IP wide area network connections to handle the growth in data traffic between data centres.
  • Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with input/output (I/O) Insight: This technology overcomes the traditional limitations of network monitoring by introducing I/O Insight, the industry’s only integrated network sensor that provides deeper visibility into the I/O performance of storage infrastructure. This enhanced visibility enables the quick identification of degraded application performance at host and storage tiers, reducing the time to resolution. I/O Insight proactively monitors the I/O performance and behaviour to gain insight into potential issues and help maintain service levels.
  • Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with VM Insight. Fabric Vision technology includes VM Insight for end-to-end visibility of the storage performance of individual VMs.  This feature optimises the VM performance in a virtualised data centre. Further, VM Insight uses standards-based VM tagging to monitor the VM-level application performance issues in a Gen 6 Fibre Channel. With this information, storage administrators can establish baseline application performance and identify anomalies in order to fine-tune the infrastructure to meet service level objectives. VM Insight also enables quick correlation with other Fabric Vision metrics to identify the root cause of problems before operations are affected.