Brocade and EMC work together

Brocade says that the company’s storage area networking (SAN) management technology is now available for more than 50,000 joint EMC and Brocade customers to immediately realize the virtualization benefits of the EMC® ViPR™ Software-Defined Storage Platform within highly virtualized cloud environments.

  • Wednesday, 2nd October 2013 Posted 11 years ago in by Phil Alsop

Specifically, Brocade® Network Advisor SAN management software has been integrated with the EMC ViPR platform to create a modern storage architecture that enables policy-based automation for managing and provisioning both EMC and non-EMC storage infrastructure using the industry-standard Storage Management Initiative (SMI) interface. This integration will help reduce data center costs and complexity for both current and future application deployments by taking advantage of Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN solutions enhanced with Brocade Fabric Vision™ technology. Brocade Network Advisor is sold by EMC as Connectrix® Manager Converged Network Edition (CMCNE).


As a result of the joint efforts, EMC SAN customers can now utilize the EMC ViPR platform to leverage existing storage infrastructures for traditional data center workloads, as well as provision new EMC ViPR Object Data Service and EMC ViPR HDFS Service through access to Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift for next-generation workloads. This complete spectrum of capabilities can be run with enterprise storage, including the EMC VMAX®, VPLEX®, VNX®, Atmos® and Isilon® families, as well as commodity storage.


EMC ViPR is the world’s first software-defined storage platform that is designed to provide the ability to manage both storage infrastructure (called the Control Plane) and the data stored within that infrastructure (called the Data Plane). It masks the complexity behind configuring and managing storage infrastructure, providing single point-and-click management for complex, heterogeneous storage functions.


“Fibre Channel continues to be the dominant storage type deployed for virtualized environments and the Brocade integration with the EMC ViPR platform enhances those deployments by enabling new use cases built on top of the most reliable and highest-performing storage network,” said Jack Rondoni, Vice President, Data Center Storage and Solutions. “Brocade and EMC customers can leverage existing and future investments in Fibre Channel SAN with full confidence, knowing that Brocade and EMC are both fully committed to making Fibre Channel an integral storage type in the Software-Defined Data Center.”


“We have worked with Brocade to ensure seamless integration of the networking stack with the ViPR platform,” said Christopher Ratcliffe, Vice President of Marketing, Advanced Software Division, EMC Corporation. “The result is a simple-to-use solution that automates and defines policies across the entire storage environment to further improve the utilization of our customers’ existing and future storage investments.”