PRESS RELEASE: Brocade Selected to Supply Storage Infrastructure for Microsoft(R) Enterprise Solutions Lab
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Tue Mar 16 08:22:25 2004 EST SAN JOSE, Calif., March 16 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (Brocade(R)) (Nasdaq: BRCD), the world's leading provider of infrastructure solutions for Storage Area Networks (SANs), today announced that Microsoft Corporation has selected Brocade as the SAN switching vendor of choice for its Enterprise Engineering Center (EEC) in Redmond, Washington. The EEC enables Microsoft to validate the deployment of its enterprise systems technologies and complex business computing scenarios by reproducing actual customer production environments running on the Windows Server System family of products. The deployment of Brocade SAN solutions in the EEC fulfills requirements to provide Microsoft customers with a comprehensive, high performance, real world system environment for enterprise software.
Customers hosted in the EEC work directly with Microsoft developers and program managers, and have the opportunity to provide direct feedback on pre- release versions of Microsoft products. The result is higher quality enterprise solutions for all customers. The EEC works with the full spectrum of commercial business, government and education organizations, and plays a key role in migrations and deployments of the next generation of Microsoft's technology.
"SANs are now part of the core infrastructure in the enterprise. The broad adoption of Brocade's technologies in this space and the depth of their technical knowledge and expertise were key reasons why we chose Brocade for our environment," said Chris Burroughs, Product Unit Manager for the Enterprise Engineering Center. "Brocade is also assisting us in a core-to- edge SAN design for the EEC so that we can quickly provision new environments for customers without rewiring our infrastructure or disrupting existing customer environments."
"We have closely collaborated with Microsoft across several generations of technology development for departmental and enterprise server environments, including pre-qualified solutions to support the Microsoft Systems Architecture (MSA) blueprint for the Enterprise Data Center," said Tom Buiocchi, Brocade Vice President of Marketing. "Our agreement to provide SAN solutions and on-site support in the EEC is an important extension of this cooperation that will help to give enterprise customers the highest level of confidence in deploying Windows Server 2003 applications in shared storage environments."
Located on Microsoft's Redmond, campus, the Enterprise Engineering Center was established in April 2002 by Microsoft, with the help of OEM partners Dell Computer Corp., EMC Corp., Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM Corp. and Unisys Corp.
About Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.
Brocade offers the industry's leading intelligent platform for networking storage. The world's leading systems, applications, and storage vendors have selected Brocade to provide a networking foundation for their SAN solutions. The Brocade SilkWorm(R) family of fabric switches and software is designed to optimize data availability and storage and server resources in the enterprise. Using Brocade solutions, companies can simplify the implementation of storage area networks, reduce the total cost of ownership of data storage environments, and improve network and application efficiency. Thousands of corporate users of Brocade solutions access exclusive information for SAN administrators and IT professionals at Brocade Connect, a comprehensive repository of SAN knowledge, tools and best practices. For more information, visit the Brocade website at www.brocade.com or contact the company at info@brocade.com.
Brocade, the Brocade B weave logo, Secure Fabric OS, and SilkWorm are registered trademarks of Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., in the United States and/or in other countries. FICON is a registered trademark of IBM Corporation in the U.S. and other countries. All other brands, products, or service names are or may be trademarks or service marks of, and are used to identify, products or services of their respective owners.
SOURCE Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. /CONTACT: Leslie Davis, Media Relations, +1-408-333-5260 or lmdavis@brocade.com, or Shirley Stacy, Investor Relations, +1-408-333-5752 or sstacy@brocade.com, both of Brocade; or Wendy Lewis of FS Communications, +1-650-691-1488 or wendy@fscomm.com, for Brocade/ /Web site: brocade.com / (BRCD BRCD2) |