Brocade’s investment in Gen 7 portfolio pays off for data center customers in need of infrastructure security and resiliency

As more businesses go digital, embracing processes that fall under the term “digital transformation,” data has become infinitely more valuable. Simply put, enterprises can’t afford service interruptions to their data.

The reality is that their customers won’t stand for anything less than 24 x 7 access to their information from anywhere, at any time, all the time. Just recall the public outcry earlier this summer after Ticketmaster was forced to cancel the sale of Taylor Swift tickets because its systems failed to handle extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and higher than usual bot traffic.

As if that wasn’t enough, enterprises have another incentive to keep critical business operations running: Any prolonged downtime can result in significant financial losses, reputational damage, and in certain cases, regulatory fines.  

Data center outages still occur. But businesses nonetheless need to mitigate these growing threats and protect their customers’ valuable information. Yet it’s not always the technical priority you might assume it would be. In fact, some storage arrays rely on software capabilities to move data from one data center to another. But when data leaves the confines of a trusted data center, travels over someone else's WAN connection, and then handshakes with the other data center, how protected is it?

This is where Brocade’s expertise and years of investment are translating into products that keep our customers’ data safe and resilient. With almost three decades in storage networking experience, Broadcom understands the importance of protecting data from cybersecurity vulnerabilities within and across data centers.

With today’s launch, we further expand the Brocade Gen 7 64G Fibre Channel portfolio, demonstrating unmatched industry innovation and technology leadership. Building on our expertise in Fibre Channel solutions, this portfolio expansion provides customers with important new functionality that better protects their data and maximizes the performance, productivity and efficiency of enterprise storage investments and resources.

Take a moment to review our highest-density Gen 7 Brocade X7 Directors as well as the Brocade 7850 Extension Switch debuting today.

X7 Director

With the launch of the industry’s highest-density Gen 7 Director, scaling up to 512 ports with the 64G 64-port blade, organizations can create high-scale fabrics while using less rack space. We engineered these high-density Gen 7 directors paying particular attention to efficiency and scale by maximizing space utilization.

The result is a high-density design that offers greater scalability and efficiency for large-scale storage environments. Enterprises can now consolidate more device connectivity into a single fabric and reduce capital expenses by consuming less rack space. Consolidated chassis offer the additional benefit of lowering operational cost by reducing power consumption, cooling and management. With industry-leading port density and increased bandwidth, enterprises can effectively scale to meet data growth demands while driving efficiency.  

Enabling massive scale combined with integrated security and autonomous SAN management, we continue to bring efficiency to IT organizations. Brocade Gen 7 implements many security measures that act autonomously to maintain the highest levels of security and resiliency.

7850 Extension Switch

Storage arrays with native replication applications generally do not handle latency and packet loss well. The Brocade 7850, the industry’s first 64G extension switch, is purpose-built to tackle those challenges. For mission-critical applications, organizations can now easily move larger amounts of data, quickly and efficiently across data centers – to ensure critical data is replicated and available in the event of a disaster.

The 7850 extends SANs over virtually any distance across the globe. Enterprises can move their data over extended distances – including intercontinental – and still ensure that data replicated between data centers is safeguarded from malicious threats. The Brocade 7850 includes a suite of features, from pre-deployment validation to advanced network failure recovery technologies, to protect data from WAN disruptions and outages. Moreover, data-in-flight security, coupled with the Brocade hardware and software robust security features, secures connections between data centers from threats over the WAN and to protect data from unauthorized access.

This release demonstrates Broadcom’s commitment to Brocade Fibre Channel technology innovation. Given the explosion in the amount of data being produced by next-generation servers and storage, it is critical for data centers to safeguard their data. Deploying a cyber resilient SAN based on Brocade Gen 7 Fibre Channel is the most effective way to mitigate the cybersecurity and downtime risks associated with legacy infrastructure. High density and global network extension technology enables Broadcom customers to build data center infrastructure that is scalable, secure and reliable.