Brocade is an industry leader in data center networking solutions and services that enable organizations to manage their most vital information assets. Global 500 companies rely on Brocade technology to keep their businesses running around the clock.

Brocade has pioneered the technologies that enable highly reliable and secure data center connectivity. Most of the world’s data flows through Brocade equipment and data center networks built on Brocade technology.

With its comprehensive family of industry-leading solutions, including Storage Area Networks (SANs) and File Area Networks (FANs), Brocade addresses critical information management challenges such as data backup, storage and server consolidation, and business continuance.

With regional sales and innovation centers located around the world, Brocade is a diverse and global company with a clear vision for continued industry leadership. Brocade has captured and maintained a greater than 80 percent market share in SANs. Moreover, new product categories continue to expand the total available market in which Brocade participates.

The Brocade Data Center Fabric (DCF) architecture is designed to help today’s organizations make their data centers more efficient, reliable, and adaptable to change. The Brocade DCF helps maximize performance and optimize key technologies (such as server virtualization) while minimizing disruptive change. In particular, it:

• Protects existing technology investments
• Utilizes a policy-driven architecture to help ensure that important data center services (such as data security, encryption, backup, and replication) are automatically available based on defined business policies
• Adapts and responds to changing requirements for managing applications and data
• Utilizes the distributed intelligence of the data center
• Enables a best-in-class solution in conjunction with products from Brocade OEM Partners

Brocade incorporate intelligence directly into its storage networking solutions - creating a highly available, scalable, and secure environment for storage applications. Using the Brocade SAN family of fabric switches and software, organizations can:

• Connect servers with storage devices and scale them independently
• Consolidate and share servers and storage resources
• Share valuable backup resources across the enterprise
• Centralize data management to handle more data without increasing personnel resources

With its File Area Network (FAN) solutions for file management, Brocade provides new tools to address a variety of cost, complexity, and compliance issues across the enterprise. These solutions are designed to simplify management in a wide range of data center and remote office environments, and help provide a fast ROI. Key benefits of Brocade FAN solutions include:

• Higher performance for improved data access
• Automation and policy-based operations for increased productivity and consistency
• Centralized management for simplified administration and greater resource utilization
• Increased control over both local and remote data assets
• Easier compliance with corporate guidelines and industry regulations

Today's IT trends include optimizing data center efficiency by utilizing server consolidation and virtualization. Blade servers are ideal platforms for optimization, and Brocade has a proven history of enabling SAN connectivity for blade servers and is developing new Host Bus Adapters (HBAs) and Intelligent Server Adapters (ISAs). These solutions integrate with Brocade fabrics to provide scalable, highly available, reliable, and robust data paths between servers and storage. Leveraging this experience, Brocade has extended its role into standard servers to support seamless, intelligent, and more manageable solutions.

Many organizations that rely on Brocade solutions have achieved unprecedented returns on their investments. These savings range from improved business continuance to optimized resource utilization and consolidation. To help organizations achieve the highest rate of return from their investments in Brocade solutions, Brocade delivers a wide range of professional services and value-added support offerings.

To help ensure the interoperability of Brocade products, Brocade maintains strategic, long-term relationships with many IT industry leaders. Brocade products, support, and education services are available through the Brocade Alliance Partner Network, which includes authorized systems integrators and value-added resellers.

In addition, Brocade solutions are available worldwide through Brocade OEM Partners, which include the world's leading server and storage systems providers.