Brocade expands Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio

By Tony Chan

Brocade has announced the addition of the X6 director family of fabrics to its Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio, which the firm said is optimised for datacentres operating with all flash-based memory arrays.  According to Brocade, Gen 6 Fibre Channel’s 32Gbps data rate now enables enterprises to take full advantage of the performance enhancements from flash memory. With Gen 6 Fibre Channel, application response time can improved by up to 71% over previous solutions.

“Legacy networks will bottleneck flash storage minimising the performance and economic benefits of this game-changing technology,” said Brocade systems engineer manager for ANZ Phillip Coates.

“Brocade’s Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions unleash the full value of today’s flash technology and enable tomorrow’s next-generation flash storage based on Non-Volatile Memory Express. NVMe will be the next disruptive storage technology in the datacentre and customers will be able to seamlessly integrate NVMe over fabrics with Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel.”

The new X6 director family operates with Brocade Fabric Vision technology and is supported by Brocade’s SX6 Extension Blade. Each X6 director delivers a total system bandwidth of 16Tbps, providing up to 384 32Gbps line rate ports and up to 32 128Gbps UltraScale ICL connectivity ports.

The new X6 director solution follows the launch of Brocade’s first Gen 6 Fibre Channel switch in March this year.

(This article first appeared in www.commsday.com)