Brocade has announced its Brocade Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture, which responds to the urgent needs of businesses to make their data centers more efficient, reliable, and adaptable.

"CIOs and data center managers face the imperative to 'do more with less.' The Brocade DCF is designed to address this challenge," said Michael Klayko, Brocade Chief Executive Officer. "Customers have told us they need to cut costs and increase speed and flexibility, while also managing growing volumes of data. With Brocade DCF we are providing them with a framework to achieve these goals, while also leveraging their existing IT and operational resources and minimizing disruption."

The Brocade DCF architecture simplifies data center connectivity and reduces costs by combining storage networking and server-to-server clustering into a single, converged data center infrastructure. In addition, it adapts to the dynamics of virtualized servers and storage, while accommodating expanding application workloads and the relentless growth of corporate data..

The Brocade DCF is an application-driven architecture. It adapts and  responds to the changing needs for managing applications and data.  Moreover, it provides a secure, reliable, and high-performance  infrastructure to help ensure that mission-critical applications  receive the resources they need in order to access and protect critical  data. 

The Brocade DCF uses the distributed intelligence of the data  center. It leverages existing data center application, server, network,  and storage elements to maximize functionality, flexibility, and choice  for customers. Competing approaches typically advocate the migration  or focus of intelligence to a single data center tier or element, often  to the detriment of customer choice and flexibility. 

The Brocade DCF is a policy-based architecture. It helps ensure that  important data center services -- such as data security, encryption,  backup, and replication -- are automatically available based on company  business policies, and that they do not encumber the infrastructure  when not in use. 

The system simplifies and optimizes important new technologies  such as server virtualization. Server virtualization can dramatically  increase data center efficiency but also can create new complexities.  The vast majority of virtual servers connect to networked storage, and  Brocade is using its deep storage networking experience to optimize and  automate these connections, helping customers to simplify their  environments and operations.  -

It provides customers with investment protection. DCF  enables customers to leverage their existing IT resources -- including  servers, storage, and SANs -- seamlessly incorporating them into the  evolving, larger data center fabric. Brocade's framework maximizes cost  savings, while minimizing disruption, risk, and incompatibilities.