Brocade Hosts First Storage Conference in China

Earlier this week, Brocade Communications opened The Brocade SAN Technology Forum, China’s largest SAN technology conference. SAN customers have joined Brocade partners, industry analysts, and members of the media in learning about the future of SAN and SAN technology from SAN experts and industry leaders.

Over 1000 attendees are taking advantage of the opportunity to network with peers and colleagues and advance their technical expertise in designing, implementing, and maintaining networked storage environments. Attendees can see the latest SAN technology exhibited by Forum sponsors, including Chaohua Technologies, Computer Associates, Dell, EMC, HP, IBM, Legend Group, StorageTek, Sun Microsystems, and VERITAS Software.

Madam Zhang Qi, Secretary of the Ministry of Information Industry, expressed her optimism for China’s enterprise storage market and her support for Brocade efforts to educate that market, saying, “As a result of our nation’s entry into the World Trade Organization, enhancing our information technology infrastructure is critical to maintaining the growth of Chinese companies. Storage area networks have fundamentally altered how enterprises plan and utilize their storage, and I hope to see Brocade work in tandem with China’s IT companies to further explore and proliferate the benefits of SANs in this country.”

In his keynote presentation, Greg Reyes, Brocade Chairman and CEO, hailed the success of the first Brocade SAN Technology Forum to be held outside of the United States, saying, “We are delighted to bring this important industry forum to China, reinforcing our commitment to help expand the knowledge base for networking storage in this rapidly growing region. Working together with the IT industry in China, we are building the support structure, education, professional services, and simplified management solutions that are helping to accelerate the deployment and growth of storage networking.”

At the conference, Brocade is announcing the Asia Pacific launch of the SilkWorm(R) 12000 64- and 128-port Core Fabric Switch, the industry’s only 2 Gigabit per second modular fabric switch designed to network true high availability enterprise storage environments. Based on the Brocade Intelligent Fabric Services architecture, the SilkWorm 12000 raises the bar for performance, functionality, flexibility, and information availability in the storage environment, enabling customers to manage and scale storage more effectively, assure continuous data availability, and reduce the overall cost of storage management.

The Forum also features a presentation by IDC analyst Wilson Wan on the most recent figures for China’s storage market and key trends companies and organizations in China should be considering, both now and in the long-term, as they turn to SANs to help increase application performance and uptime. Attendees will hear industry insights from Brocade technology partners in a wide range of breakout sessions, with in-depth presentations reviewing SAN implementation and management, assessing and designing SANs to fit specific business requirements, analyzing and optimizing SAN performance, and SAN security.