Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. today announced the general availability of the Brocade SilkWorm(R) 3800 Enterprise Fabric Switch, the first in a family of 2 Gigabit per second (Gbit/sec) products designed for enterprise storage environments.
“Enterprises are looking for ways to maximize the return on their IT investment by extracting greater efficiencies. The storage environment is now a leverage point for more efficient management of information resources,” said John Webster, Senior Analyst at Illuminata, a leading IT research firm. “Today’s announcement by Brocade and further announcements by its OEM partners should be viewed by enterprise users as evidence that SAN fabrics can be the nexus of a centralized, efficient information management strategy.”
Brocade said the SilkWorm 3800 delivers new features such as 2 Gbit/sec data rates, aggregated trunking to deliver 8 Gbit/sec speeds between switches in a fabric, and content-based analysis based on the new Brocade Frame Filtering capability. According to the company, these advanced fabric services automate configuration and operation of the SAN fabric, optimize performance, and increase application availability.
The company said the SilkWorm 3800 is forward and backward compatible with the
entire installed base of Brocade fabric switches — more than 1,000,000 Fibre
Channel ports — allowing existing Brocade customers to migrate
from 1 to 2 Gbit/sec SAN environments and deploy a highly scalable and
reliable core-to-edge storage networking infrastructure.
The Brocade SilkWorm 3800 Enterprise Fabric Switch is generally available today through select Brocade OEM partners. Pricing varies by OEM partner and SAN solution configuration.