COSTA MESA & SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 29 — Emulex Corporation, a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, and Brocade, Inc., the industry leader in networking fabrics, today announced a commitment to jointly develop and align the two companies’ roadmaps around a new generation of advanced Gen 6 (32Gb) Fibre Channel networking solutions, enabling increased network performance, higher scalability and improved reliability for the highly virtualized data center.

Emulex and Brocade have a long history of driving industry innovation, including recently announced support for Brocade ClearLink diagnostics, which ensures the reliability and management of storage network configurations, and Emulex Gen 5 Flash Services, including ExpressLane, which provides Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities for flash/solid state disk (SSD)-based storage and Emulex CrossLink which provides in-band message passing between server nodes, delivering optimized performance using lossless, standards-based FC protocols.

Emulex and Brocade are jointly developing technology to deliver:

• Industry Leading Network Performance with Gen 6 (32Gb) FC: Emulex and Brocade will partner to develop end-to-end 32GFC-based solutions that will improve performance and scalability to support the demands of highly virtualized data centers and flash/SSD-based applications.
• Extending Fibre Channel’s Industry Leading Reliability: Emulex and Brocade are delivering ClearLink, an advanced end-to-end diagnostic solution, that performs in-band tests on both Brocade Gen 5 FC switches and Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs, which can detect problems with the physical cabling and optics that could result in increased error rates and intermittent problems.
• Enabling Flash and SSD Solutions: Emulex and Brocade will partner to create solutions that highlight Emulex’s innovative ExpressLane and CrossLink technology which is designed to enhance the QoS, optimize I/O performance and increase return on investment (ROI) in IT environments using fabric-based flash arrays and server-based cache.

“Emulex and Brocade have been on the leading edge of innovation in Fibre Channel for virtualization, flash/SSD and cloud applications,” said Shaun Walsh, senior vice president of marketing and corporate development, Emulex. “We are committed to the long term future of Fibre Channel, and are aggressively pursuing our Gen 6 FC roadmap. By working with Brocade, we will continue to be leaders in this strategic market, just as we have been in the Gen 5 FC market transition.”

“Brocade and Emulex are continuing to collaborate on innovative products to meet the needs of our mutual customers,” said Jack Rondoni, vice president of product management at Brocade. “Customers clearly value the work we have done to integrate ClearLink with Emulex LightPulse Gen 5 FC HBAs and are looking to Emulex and Brocade for continued innovation, and this roadmap alignment ensures that we will meet their needs.”

Emulex also announced today that it has certified its recently announced OneConnect OCe14000 family of 10Gb and 40Gb Ethernet Network Adapters and Converged Network Adapters with Brocade’s flagship VDX Ethernet Fabric switches for the modern data center.

About Emulex

Emulex, a leader in network connectivity, monitoring and management, provides hardware and software solutions for global networks that support enterprise, cloud, government and telecommunications. Emulex’s products enable unrivalled end-to-end application visibility, optimisation and acceleration. The Company’s I/O connectivity offerings, including its line of ultra high-performance Ethernet and Fibre Channel-based connectivity products, have been designed into server and storage solutions from leading OEMs, including Cisco, Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi, HP, Huawei, IBM, NetApp and Oracle, and can be found in the data centres of nearly all of the Fortune 1000. Emulex’s monitoring and management solutions, including its portfolio of network visibility and recording products, provide organisations with complete network performance management at speeds up to 100Gb Ethernet. Emulex is headquartered in Costa Mesa, Calif., and has offices and research facilities in North America, Asia and Europe. For more information about Emulex please visit http://www.Emulex.com.

About Brocade

Brocade networking solutions help the world’s leading organizations transition smoothly to a world where applications and information reside anywhere. (www.brocade.com)

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Source: Emulex