BRCD,
IBM Delivers Brocade's New Enterprise Fabric Operating System
PR Newswire - July 09, 2003 08:22
IBM Makes Available Enterprise High Availability, Manageability, Security, and a Path to FICON Support to Brocade Storage Networking Customers Worldwide
SAN JOSE, Calif., July 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (Brocade(R)) (Nasdaq: BRCD), a leading provider of infrastructure for Storage Area Networks (SANs), announced today that the Brocade Enterprise Fabric Operating System is available worldwide through IBM. These enhancements to the Brocade Enterprise Fabric Operating System (Fabric OS) deliver the capabilities required in Director-class environments, including fabric-based security, simplified management, and true high availability. In addition IBM has also made a statement of future direction on implementation of FICON for Brocade SAN infrastructure. The IBM TotalStorage SAN Switch M12, built by Brocade, is designed to enable future support for mainframe FICON Director switching with FICON Control Unit Port (CUP) support.
As part of this release, IBM is offering the Brocade Secure Fabric Operating System (Secure Fabric OS(R)), the industry's first policy-based fabric security offering designed to secure the whole fabric for the most robust security protection available today. IBM is also delivering Brocade Fabric Manager 4.0, the next generation of Brocade's SAN management software that configures, monitors, provisions, and manages multiple Brocade switches and SANs from a single console.
"We've had access to these new features in our Total Storage Solutions Center for some time, and customer feed back has been very positive. We look forward to taking advantage of the enhanced high availability, simplified management, and improved scalability with the delivery of Brocade Enterprise Fabric Operating System for the TotalStorage switch family," said Mike O'Brien, Manager of Storage Network Solutions at Mainline Information Systems. "Many of our customers, even those with small SANs, want to track performance characteristics and Brocade's Advanced Performance Monitor gathers this data for servers or storage, measuring end-to-end performance to demonstrate quality of service. In addition, the Secure Fabric OS is designed to lock down the fabric from threats both inside and outside the data center. We are pleased to see that Brocade continues to improve the software platform and re-affirm our customers' choice of Brocade products."
"Brocade intelligent SAN infrastructure plays a strategic role in enabling IBM's customers to become eBusiness On Demand companies," said Scott Drummond, Program Director, IBM Storage Networking. "Brocade and IBM are working together to innovate and deliver the kinds of storage networking products that enable organizations to achieve their vision."
"We developed the Brocade Enterprise Fabric Operating System to enable IT administrators to protect their data and simplify management of their Brocade environments," said Tom Buiocchi, Brocade Vice President of Marketing. "With the introduction of this software, IBM will deliver enhanced high availability, simplified management, fabric based security, and improved scalability-all imperatives for a Director-class SAN product."
New capabilities based on the Brocade Enterprise Fabric OS include:
-- Advanced SAN Security through Secure Fabric OS -- the industry's only
SAN security product that offers centralized management of SAN
security policies and protects the SAN by using the strongest,
enterprise-class security methods available, including digital
certificates and digital signatures, multiple levels of password
protection, encryption of management information such as passwords,
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI)-based authentication, and 1024-bit
encryption of passwords.
-- Simplified Management through Fabric Manager, the Brocade fabric
management software that configures, monitors, provisions, and manages
multiple switches, SANs, and HBAs from a single console. Fabric
Manager 4.0 -- the next generation of Brocade' SAN fabric management
software -- includes new features such as integrated HBA management,
advanced security management, and call home capabilities.
-- Enhanced High Availability, for non-disruptive firmware activation and
enhanced failover capabilities. IBM has a long standing OEM
relationship with Brocade and delivers the complete Brocade
SilkWorm(R) product family, which is sold as the IBM TotalStorage SAN
Switch family. |
