IBM has qualified Brocade Advanced Accelerator for FICON

href="http://www.dqweek.com/Brocade-and-McAfee-joins-for-channel-enablement-programs">Brocade
announced that IBM has
qualified Brocade Advanced Accelerator for FICON on the latest
generation of Brocade storage area networking (SAN) extension
solutions used to connect geographically dispersed data centers. This
new solution optimizes mainframe application performance between
datacenters, allowing customers to more effectively accommodate
applications that demand high bandwidth between their datacenters,
such as data replication and Virtual Tape Servers (VTS).

Cloud computing will increasingly
require geographically distributed storage architectures, which are
both critical and complex to deploy. The Brocade One vision is
Brocade's road map for creating products and solutions that allow
applications and information to reside anywhere, leveraging Brocade's
technology heritage and leadership. “At Kanematsu Electronics, our
clients rely upon mainframe environments for their most
business-critical applications, especially our financial customers,”
said Yasuhiro Kikukawa, General Executive Officer-GM of Business
Development Division, Kanematsu Electronics (a Japan-based reseller).
“We have installed more than 1,000 Brocade extension products in
the Japanese market because we trust their ability to deliver the
highest levels of reliability and performance in moving data over
distance,” quoted Kikukawa.

FICON is a high-speed input/output
(I/O) interface for mainframe computer connections to storage
devices. Brocade Advanced Accelerator for FICON delivers the
industry's highest-performance and most robust mainframe extension
solutions over 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) and 10 GbE connections
utilizing Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP)
technology to connect and extend storage over virtually any distance
for critical applications such as backup, disaster recovery and
business continuity.

Brocade Advanced Accelerator for FICON
increases operational efficiency by leveraging emulation techniques
to reduce or eliminate performance degradation for mainframe
applications across long-distance Ethernet/IP wide area networks.
Customers can reap benefits such as improved FICON read and write
performance over distance, enhanced data protection while meeting
recovery objectives, faster backup and disaster recovery operations,
reduced WAN bandwidth use and cost and support for new solutions while
protecting existing investments. “Brocade has more than 25 years of
expertise and a deep heritage in building robust mainframe storage
network extension solutions,” said Doug Ingraham, VP-Product
Management, Data Center Products, Brocade. “Today's announcement
reinforces both IBM's and Brocade's commitment to investment
protection for our customers' existing IT infrastructures, as well
as our technology innovation in advancing remote storage application
performance to the next level.”

“IBM is committed to working closely
with industry leaders like Brocade to offer clients a choice of
network switching products,” said Bob Mahoney, Business Line
Executive-System Networking Sales and Marketing, IBM.