Brocade appoints Country Manager for Malaysia, announces new Gen 6 FC solutions

Source: Brocade. Abdul Aziz.

Brocade has named Abdul Aziz Ali as Country Manager for Malaysia. In this role, Abdul Aziz will be responsible for leading local operations and charting the company’s business growth in Malaysia. Based in Kuala Lumpur, he will report to Beni Sia, Brocade Regional Director for South East Asia.

Bringing more than two decades of industry experience to Brocade, Abdul Aziz was most recently with BIT Group, a Malaysian-owned provider of IT solutions and services focused on the implementation and maintenance of networking infrastructure and software, where he served as the group CEO. Prior to joining BIT Group in 2015, he was the Country Manager for Malaysia and Brunei at Juniper Networks. He has also held various business development and management roles at Cisco and EMC.

“Malaysia is a strategic market for Brocade within the Southeast Asia region, given its strong potential in infrastructure development and robust demand for new IP networking solutions,” said Sia. “Aziz’s experience and track record in building out businesses, and his foresight in software networking, will be invaluable in accelerating our growth in Malaysia and helping our customers capitalise on their networks for digital transformation.”

“Brocade has transformed itself to become the leading disruptor in the networking industry today. I share the same vision that software is the future for networks, and there is no better time than now to join Brocade,” said Abdul Aziz. “I am excited by the prospect of working with our customers and partners to help them leverage their networks as a strategic business enabler, and I look forward to that.”

Brocade earlier announced the industry’s first Gen 6 Fibre Channel directors for mission-critical storage connectivity and business resiliency solutions designed for the all-flash data centre. This extends the company’s leadership in offering Fibre Channel storage network solutions, building on the first Gen 6 Fibre Channel switch that Brocade delivered in March 2016.

The new BrocadeX6 director family and the Brocade SX6 extension blade for Fibre Channel, Fibre Connection (FICON) and IP storage replication, combined with Brocade Fabric Vision technology, enables customers to drive always-on business operations, eliminate performance bottlenecks and adapt to the requirements of digital organisations.

As organisations continue to digitise and adapt to new workloads, they need a modern storage network that supports business agility. Fibre Channel fabrics are the common thread that connects organisations to critical applications and data. Ninety-six percent of banks, insurance companies and retailers rely on Fibre Channel as the most trusted network infrastructure for storage. Gen 6 Fibre Channel provides the digital enterprise with availability and performance required for tomorrow’s hyperscale data centres.

“Legacy networks will bottleneck flash storage minimising the performance and economic benefits of this game-changing technology,” said Jack Rondoni, VP of storage networking at Brocade. “Brocade’s Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions unleash the full value of today’s flash technology and enable tomorrow’s next-generation flash storage based on non-volatile memory express (NVMe). NVMe will be the next disruptive storage technology in the data centre and customers will be able to seamlessly integrate NVMe over fabrics with Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel.”

Network automation is key to modernising data centres, says Brocade. According to a global CIO survey*, 75% of respondents stated that the network is impacting their organisations' ability to achieve business goals. The lack of network automation and integration of the network with other IT operations is the single biggest inhibitor to capitalising on digitisation.

The Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio combines hardware, Brocade Fabric Vision technology and integrated monitoring for storage IO and virtual machine (VM) performance. This delivers the high operational stability while redefining application performance for hyperscale, mission-critical storage. New features in Brocade’s Gen 6 Fibre Channel portfolio include:

· Brocade X6 Director Family
The industry-first Gen 6 Fibre Channel director family delivers breakthrough application performance, data centre-proven reliability and increased business agility to accelerate data access, adapt to evolving requirements and drive always-on business operations. The Brocade X6 directors provide up to 384 32 Gbps line rate ports and up to 32 128 Gbps UltraScale ICL connectivity ports delivering a total system bandwidth of 16 Tbps. Breakthrough 32 Gbps performance accelerates application response time by up to 71% over previous solution eliminating IO bottlenecks and unleashing the full performance of flash and next generation NVMe-based storage.

· Brocade SX6 Extension Blade
The Brocade SX6 extension blade for Fibre Channel, FICON and IP storage replication moves more data over distance faster and enhances security without compromising performance. With up to 80 Gbps application throughput per platform and line-rate encryption, the Brocade SX6 is designed for the most demanding environments. This purpose-built solution delivers business resiliency at scale with 32 Gbps Fibre Channel and 1/10 GbE IP storage replication over 1/10/40 GbE IP WAN connections to handle the unrelenting growth of data traffic between data centers.

· Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with IO Insight
Fabric Vision technology overcomes the traditional limitations of network monitoring by introducing IO Insight, an integrated network sensor that provides deeper visibility into the IO performance of storage infrastructure. This enhanced visibility enables quick identification of degraded application performance at host and storage tiers reducing time to resolution. IO Insight proactively monitors IO performance and behaviour to gain unparalleled insight into potential issues and help maintain service levels.

· Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with VM Insight
Fabric Vision technology will include VM Insight for unparalleled end-to-end visibility into the storage performance of individual VMs. This feature optimises VM performance and availability in a virtualized data center. VM Insight uses standards-based VM tagging to enable monitoring of VM-level application performance issues in a Gen 6 Fibre Channel SAN. Using this information, storage administrators can establish baseline application performance and identify anomalies in order to fine-tune the infrastructure to meet service level objectives. VM Insight also enables quick correlation with other Fabric Vision metrics to identify the root cause of problems before operations are affected.

Hitachi Data Systems is shipping the Brocade Gen 6 directors, blades and switch. “Digital transformation enables businesses to deliver superior customer experiences. That cannot be accomplished without a modern and agile IT infrastructure that delivers information to customers faster than ever before,” said Bob Madaio, VP of infrastructure solutions marketing, Hitachi Data Systems. “The combination of the Hitachi flash portfolio with Brocade’s Gen 6 directors, blades and switch enables businesses to transform operations and serve data to customers radically faster so they get what they want, when they want it.”

Interested?

Brocade Network Advisor and IO Insight are available today. Brocade X6 directors and Brocade SX6 extension blades are through Brocade and its channel partners. Other Brocade OEM partners will start shipping them in the 2H16. VM Insight will be included as part of Fabric Vision technology in the first half of 2017.

*Global CIO Study 2015, Vanson Bourne, May 2015

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