Features - Enterprise Data Insights:

BROCADE SHOWCASED AS NET FOUNDATION FOR WORLD'S LARGEST SAN

Brocade Communications Systems Inc (Brocade), one of the world's leading providers of infrastructure solutions for Storage Area Networks (SANs), announced that at the ENSA@WORK 2003 conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands last week, HP unveiled the industry's first public demonstration of a 1,000-port, heterogeneous SAN, based on Brocade SAN infrastructure. The massive, HP-funded showcase was designed to rival the data centre environments of the most demanding and progressive enterprises in the world. From an infrastructure perspective, the SAN consisted of sixty-six servers, twenty-three disk arrays, eight tape libraries, and more than 100 host bus adapters, all internetworked by thirty-six Brocade SilkWorm fabric switches.

At the conference, Greg Reyes, Chairman and CEO of Brocade, joined executives from HP and Microsoft to discuss how HP's adaptive storage infrastructure puts the customer in control to deliver services essential for business success. During his keynote, Reyes discussed the latest technology advances in storage networking and announced an expanded relationship between HP and Brocade to provide an intelligent platform for fabric-based applications, dramatically increasing operational efficiency and simplifying heterogeneous storage management. Fabric-based applications are an emerging category of storage management applications that enable consolidation of important storage management functions, such as data replication and volume management, in the SAN fabric itself.

"Storage networks remain top of mind for customers because they increase operational efficiency and provide a distinct competitive advantage. We came together at ENSA@WORK to tell HP customers and partners that HP and Brocade are delivering an adaptive storage infrastructure that addresses the real pain points in the datacenter today and as SANs continue to scale," said Greg Reyes, Brocade Chairman and CEO. "By moving more intelligence into the fabric, end users gain extended functionality and reduced operational cost and complexity in their existing server and storage environments. Furthermore, Brocade partners like HP are extending their own storage management applications to the Brocade SilkWorm Fabric Application Platform, allowing them a new arena for differentiation and a new landing pad for their software. We are excited that HP is the first to take advantage of this unique opportunity."

As part of its overarching virtualisation strategy, HP announced with Brocade that it will be the first to deploy virtualisation on the Brocade SilkWorm Fabric Application Platform. This development relationship will provide virtualisation customers with industry-leading functionality, scalability, and performance for heterogeneous, enterprise SANs. In addition, it will greatly simplify today's storage management paradigm by reducing the need to host and manage these applications across multiple servers and operating systems. Brocade will be delivering the SilkWorm Fabric Application Platform as a result of its intended acquisition of Rhapsody Networks, which is expected to occur shortly.

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 family of fabric switches and software is designed to optimise 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. For more information, visit the Brocade Web site at www.brocade.com/ or contact the company at info@brocade.com.

Contact: Shirley Stacy, 408-392-5752, sstacy@brocade.com.