Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) has qualified its converged network adapters (CNAs) with some of the biggest names in data storage, as the newcomer to storage networking adapters tries to break into a market that has been dominated by Emulex (NYSE: ELX) and QLogic (NASDAQ: QLGC).
Brocade, which holds a big lead over Cisco (NASDAQ: CSCO) in the market for storage switches, said its 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) CNAs are available from EMC (NYSE: EMC), Hitachi Data Systems (HDS), IBM (NYSE: IBM) and NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP), with others presumably to follow.
Brocade’s Fibre Channel host bus adapter (HBA) sales have been slow to materialize, but perhaps the convergence of data and storage networking, driven by 10GbE and FCoE, can change that. However, most analysts don’t see FCoE beginning to take off for another year or more.
Brocade said its single-chip CNAs, available in the single-port Brocade 1010 and dual-port 1020, can deliver up to a million IOPS on a dual-port card. The CNAs support Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) and Data Center Bridging (DCB) standards for low-latency, lossless Ethernet, making them good for “high-performance, reliable iSCSI solutions,” the company said.
Brocade said its 8000 FCoE switch connected to servers equipped with Brocade 1010 and 1020 CNAs can extend fabric services to the virtual machine level and work in conjunction with the Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager (DCFM) “to provide virtual machine visibility and true end-to-end network management from a single view.”
Dell’Oro Group predicts that FCoE CNAs will grow from 2,000 ports in 2008 to 2.7 million in 2014.
For more on the CNAs, see Brocade CNAs qualified by EMC, HDS, IBM, NetApp at InfoStor.com.
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