Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel Solutions shipped by Dell EMC, Fujitsu, HDS and NetApp

Brocade has announced continued momentum for its Gen 6 Fibre Channel storage networking solutions with availability from its key OEM partners, including Dell EMC, Fujitsu and NetApp. This announcement is in addition to Hitachi Data Systems shipping Brocade Gen 6 directors, blade and switch since July, reinforcing Fibre Channel as the protocol of choice for mission-critical enterprise storage. 

A June 2016 Gartner report, “The Future of Storage Protocols”, states that “storage networking investments are becoming a critical top priority due to the adoption of high-throughput, solid-state and flash storage…  Storage performance bottlenecks are moving out of arrays and into the storage network, so Fibre Channel will remain as the data center storage protocol of choice for the next decade.” 

Fibre Channel is generally accepted as the lowest latency and most reliable network infrastructure for storage. Gen 6 Fibre Channel technology enables organizations to address their performance, reliability, and scalability requirements for the all-flash data center, new data center architectures and next-generation storage technologies.  

"We are pleased that the recent Gartner report reiterates the importance of Fibre Channel as the data center protocol of choice for storage networking for the foreseeable future," said Jack Rondoni, Vice-President of Storage Networking, Brocade. “Through our OEM partners, including Dell EMC, Fujitsu, HDS and NetApp, we are already delivering Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions that maximize the performance of flash storage and deliver unprecedented reliability and scalability. We plan to have additional announcements in the coming months as more partners launch our Gen 6 platforms.”  

"AOL continues to rely on Fibre Channel for storage connectivity to our most critical systems,” said Dan Pollack, Chief Architect of Storage Operations, AOL. “We recently started the refresh of our existing infrastructure to Gen 6 Fibre Channel. AOL is committed to Fibre Channel for the future when our systems demand extremely high performance and availability."