Brocade rolled out a new portfolio of networking solutions, designed to enable customers to create data center network fabrics based on 16Gbps Fibre Channel technologies. Brocade's fabric technology is aimed at customers building out private clouds.

The portfolio consists of five new products, including a SAN backbone, a fixed-configuration switch targeted at small and medium-size businesses, a fabric server adapter, network-management software and a new release of the company's fabric operating system.

The SAN backbone enables creation of a storage fabric. The reason for Brocade's focus on storage fabric is that highly virtualized environments and private-cloud environments require access for all servers to the all storage resources.

"That drives the need for shared storage infrastructure," Jason Nolet, VP of data center and enterprise networking said.

Data center consolidation is another driver behind this trend. As customers virtualize servers, they are increasingly going from a larger number of smaller data centers to a smaller number of larger data centers, which also requires shared storage, Nolet said.

The vendor has tried to make it easy for existing customers to gradually upgrade their data center networks to fabrics. All existing DCX chassis currently deployed are upgradable to 16Gbps and all new services, Nolet said. The upgrade requires replacement of line cards and a software upgrade.

Additionally, all ports in the new solutions run at 2Gbps, 4Gbps, 8Gbps and 16Gbps.

The new Brocade DCX 8510 backbone is a SAN backbone built to support private-cloud storage. The product comes in 8-slot and 4-slot chassis versions, supporting up to 384 16Gbps ports at line-rate speeds and 8.2 terabits per second of chassis bandwidth.

The second hardware piece of the announcement, the SMB-geared 1U 6510 switch is purpose-built to enhance server virtualization, virtual desktop infrastructure and solid-state-disc storage deployments. The fixed-configuration switch can be expanded gradually, as demand dictates, in 12-port increments from 24 to 48 ports.

The switch provides up to 768Gbps aggregate throughput.

In its announcement, Brocade drew attention to power consumption of its new products. The new backbone, for example, takes 0.27 watts per 1Gbps;and the 6510 switch uses 0.14 watts per 1Gbps.

Brocade's new 1860 fabric adapter supports Fibre Channel, FCoE and Ethernet on a single server adapter, a feature that adds flexibility to I/O consolidation. The vendor says the adapter is well-suited for private-cloud-optimized data center networks.

The adapter provides wire-speed performance for both 16Gbps Fibre Channel and 10GbE.

The new network-management software, Network Advisor 11.1 is for Fibre Channel, wired Ethernet, wireless Ethernet and converged-network environments.

According to Brocade, the software integrates seamlessly with third-party storage-resource management and data center orchestration tools. These are tools such as EMC's Resource Management Suite and HP's Virtual Connect Enterprise and Storage Provisioning managers.

Finally, the latest-generation 7.0 build of Brocade's Fabric operating system includes new features like bottleneck detection, advanced performance monitoring and adaptive networking.

All new products are already available for purchase.