Founded in 1995, Brocade® has been helping businesses and government institutions build more efficient and reliable information networks throughout the world. Today, Brocade is widely recognized as the proven innovation and thought leader in data center and enterprise networking.

A Storage Area Network (SAN) pioneer and technology innovator, Brocade has continued expanding its product portfolio through the acquisition of technology companies such as Foundry Networks, McDATA, Silverback, NuView, and Rhapsody as well as data center professional services providers such as Strategic Business Systems (SBS). These acquisitions have provided over 25 years of broad networking experience and expertise in the most demanding customer environments.

Brocade combines a proven track record of expertise, innovation, and new technology development with standards leadership and strategic partnerships with the world’s leading IT companies. The result is the industry’s most comprehensive family of reliable, high-performance, and efficient networking solutions that provide a reliable foundation for extraordinary networks.

Brocade at a Glance

Major industries around the globe rely on Brocade technology for their mission-critical data processing environments. In manufacturing, finance, healthcare, energy, government, and other sectors, Brocade is the technology provider of choice for more than 90 percent of data center deployments.

With more than 20 qualified OEM partners and hundreds of integrators, resellers, and solution partners, Brocade solutions are ubiquitous throughout the IT world. Brocade products are qualified through rigorous testing and partner certification and have proven themselves in the most demanding production environments as part of best-in-class IT solutions.

Today, Brocade develops products and solutions for three primary market segments:

•Data centers

•Campus networks

•Service providers

Brocade also provides simplified management solutions, intelligent network services, and professional consulting services that help organizations streamline administration, maximize productivity, and reduce costs. These high-performance, high-reliability solutions are the foundation for extraordinary networks that provide unique business value across the enterprise (see Figure 1).

As the company moves forward, its mission is to continue reducing infrastructure costs and risk by delivering extraordinary networks that provide the industry’s highest levels of performance, reliability, and value. In addition, Brocade is focused on helping organizations transform their infrastructures to enable next-generation virtual infrastructures.

The Evolution of the Virtual Enterprise

A variety of dramatic changes are occurring throughout today’s enterprises, foremost of which is the need for continuous data accessibility. New types of connectivity devices and the increasing number and mobility of users have driven an unprecedented need to source and access information from anywhere at anytime. Combined with explosive data growth, this development creates a daunting challenge for IT organizations.

At a fundamental level, these organizations require much greater flexibility in deploying applications and data storage. Virtualizing where applications run and how data is stored has been a good first step in meeting the need to store, manage, manipulate, and distribute data across the enterprise more efficiently. In turn, Brocade is focused on developing technologies that not only enable but also optimize the benefits of virtual environments.

Higher Speed and Quality with Lower Cost and Risk

Brocade delivers extraordinary networks for the most demanding environments by focusing on increasing speed and quality to reduce both cost and risk.

Brocade continues to lead the industry in high-performance networking solutions and industry-first technologies. Higher performance and quality equal greater customer productivity and more effective utilization of network assets. Brocade has a proven track record of exceptional quality and reliability, enabling data center applications that require continuous business operations.

Brocade also focuses on reducing costs and risk. With ever-increasing budget pressures, cost containment is a key priority in today’s network deployments. Brocade helps organizations reduce Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) by leveraging advanced technologies that increase port density and performance while reducing energy consumption. This approach facilitates asset consolidation and simplifies management, thereby lowering capital and operating expenses.

Today’s cost-conscious organizations also value investment protection and risk mitigation. Brocade ensures that its current solutions will interoperate with future infrastructure and products. Through adherence to industry standards and rigorous interoperability testing with OEM, technology, and strategic partners, Brocade provides certified solutions that enable organizations to turn away from “rip-and-replace” approaches in order to provide ongoing investment protection.

Brocade Solutions for Data Center Networks

The pioneer and leader in data center Fibre Channel SAN technology with over 75 percent market share, Brocade continues to introduce innovative solutions that provide higher performance, advanced services, energy efficiency, and simplified management at a lower total cost than the competition.

Key products for data center networks include:

•Fibre Channel backbones and directors

•Fibre Channel fabric switches

•Layer 2–3 edge and core switches/routers

•MAN, WAN, and Fibre Channel extension connectivity

•Fibre Channel and CEE server connectivity

•Embedded switches for blade servers

•Application delivery and traffic management switching

•Security solutions

•Unified data center management suite

Optimized for today’s virtualized server and storage environments, Brocade extraordinary networks are designed to enhance business flexibility while maximizing data availability and protection. As a result, resilient and energy-efficient Brocade solutions are the preferred choice for data centers worldwide and the foundation for leading-edge technologies.

The industry-leading bandwidth, density, and power efficiency of Brocade solutions enable large-scale consolidation based on products that provide up to five times the bandwidth while consuming only one-third the power of competitive systems.

Brocade data center IP switching, routing, security, and traffic management products are engineered for the rigorous requirements of data centers—such as consolidation, scalability, and business continuity. These products help maximize system availability to ensure continuous business operations.

Brocade products include Layer 2–3 features that provide security and high availability at the protocol level by restoring services in sub-second time to eliminate costly service disruptions. Moreover, a fully redundant architecture enables organizations to deploy a highly reliable IP network infrastructure resilient to and tolerant of network and equipment failures. Designing lower power consumption and higher density into 1 Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet products further minimizes the network impact on data center power, cooling, and footprint.

Brocade Solutions for Campus Networks

For campus networks, Brocade offers state-of-the-art products such as:

•Ethernet backbone and aggregation solutions

•Layer 2–3 edge switches

•Converged edge Power over Ethernet (PoE) infrastructure

•Security solutions

•Wireless connectivity solutions

•Centralized network management suite

These products outperform the competition by a factor of five, consume less power per port, and reduce costs through simplified, consolidated deployment and management. In addition, Brocade products support the convergence of voice, video, and data through advanced features and fully powered PoE ports—helping to ensure full utilization of network infrastructures.

Brocade Solutions for Service Providers

Brocade solutions for service providers address critical business requirements, such as reduced ownership costs, high performance, and high capacity/density. They include:

•IPv4, IPv6, and MPLS core routers

•Advanced Layer 2–3 and MPLS edge and aggregation switches

•CPE and MTU switch infrastructures

These solutions span a wide range of service provider infrastructures, including:

•Metro and carrier Ethernet

•Internet routing

•IPTV services for telco operators

•Cable and multiservice operators

•Carrier long-haul backbones

•Internet Data Centers (IDCs)

•Internet eXchange Points (IXPs)

Supporting some of the largest networks around the globe, Brocade solutions help service providers achieve more competitive pricing, increased profitability through higher-margin services, and faster overall ROI. In turn, Brocade leadership in high-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet, and progress toward 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet interfaces—as well as value-added technologies—empowers service providers to meet growing customer demands for faster, more intelligent, and more robust networks

BROCADE GLOBAL SERVICES

To complement its hardware and software solutions, Brocade provides a broad suite of global services to help organizations:

•Reduce the cost and complexity of their IT infrastructures

•Ensure business continuity

•Meet regulatory compliance and security requirements

•Augment IT staff resources

•Implement next-generation virtualized environments

Brocade global services include:

Virtualization design and implementation

Data migration, protection, and backup

Security audit and hardening

Onsite residency services and remote monitoring

Mainframe performance analysis

Infrastructure architecture, sizing, and optimization

Summary

The proliferation of new virtualization technologies uniquely positions Brocade to maximize the value of the virtual enterprise by enhancing scalability, reducing costs, and simplifying network management. Through efficient, high-performance networking solutions, Brocade enables organizations to meet their ever-increasing performance and availability requirements while containing both costs and risk.

And, with its acquisitions and technology leadership, Brocade continues to deliver extraordinary networks that provide a clear competitive advantage.

To learn more, visit www.brocade.com/extraordinary.