Brocade Ethernet Fabric Technologies Awarded TechTarget Products of the Year

Brocade VCS Fabric Technology Wins Gold in Hardware for Virtualization Category by SearchServerVirtualization.com; Brocade VDX 6720 Data Center Switch Takes Silver in Computing Hardware Category by SearchDataCenter.com

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia.– Jan. 25, 2012: Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD), the leader in fabric-based data center networking solutions, today announced that Brocade® VCS® Fabric technology and the Brocade VDX® 6720 Data Center Switch received industry recognition in two Products of the Year award competitions, according to the editors of TechTarget Inc.’s Data Center and Virtualization Media Group.

Brocade VCS Fabric technology, a foundational element to building Ethernet fabrics and revolutionizing the design of Layer 2 networks for cloud-optimized data center deployments, was awarded the top honor – Gold Product of the Year in the Hardware for Virtualization category of the SearchServerVirtualization.com 2011 Products of the Year awards competition. This technology provides advanced Ethernet fabric capabilities, including virtual machine (VM) awareness and network automation, enabling organizations to transition smoothly to highly virtualized and cloud-based environments.

The Brocade VDX 6720 was also named a Product of the Year, winning the Silver award in the Computing Hardware category of the SearchDataCenter.com 2011 Products of the Year awards competition. The Brocade VDX 6720 delivers innovative technology to enhance and simplify networks, offering a rich set of Layer 2 features. The high-performance, ultra-low latency, wire-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) fixed port switch can be utilized as a classic Top-of-Rack (ToR) switch and can also be easily deployed in Brocade VCS Ethernet fabric mode with an additional software license.

The SearchServerVirtualization.com and SearchDataCenter.com 2011 Products of the Year awards recognize products that stand apart from the pack and provide exceptional benefits for IT organizations of all sizes. Winners were selected from a pool of products announced and shipped between Nov. 1, 2010, and Nov. 1, 2011. Scores of nominations were submitted by vendors and users, and then evaluated by the respective publication’s editorial staff, in conjunction with a team of users, industry experts, analysts and consultants, who selected the winners based on ease of integration into existing environments, functionality, innovation, manageability, performance, and value.

In its evaluation of Brocade VCS Fabric technology, SearchStorageVirtualization.com judges commented that, “Brocade’s product stands out because it knows where each virtual machine is and what exactly is attached to the fabric in a virtual infrastructure. These capabilities come in handy when trying to secure a fabric to support only VMs, for example. Another benefit of the product is that it works with VMware vCenter, so it can tell automatically what’s connected, instead of having to learn it over time.”

In awarding Silver to the Brocade VDX 6720, SearchDataCenter.com judges stated that, “The Brocade VDX 6720 delivers innovative technology to enhance and simplify networks. It also offers a rich set of Layer 2 features, making the Brocade VDX 6720 an ideal platform for traditional top-of-rack switch deployments – and putting the switch near the top of any enterprise data center’s wish list.”

“More than 300 customers have already deployed our Ethernet fabric solutions and are a testament to the simplicity, resilience and zero-touch VM manageability of our Brocade VDX data center switches and VCS Fabric technology,” said John McHugh, vice president and chief marketing officer at Brocade. “The rapid adoption of this Brocade innovation and recognition such as these awards, leads us to believe that we will more than double the number of data centers that are running our Ethernet fabric solutions over the next year.”

The Product of the Year award is the latest recognition for Brocade Ethernet fabric technologies. In January 2011, CTO Edge awarded the Brocade VDX 6720 as the “Most Important IT Product for 2010.” In an “Open Industry Network Performance & Power Test for Cloud Networks,” published in December 2011 by The Lippis Group, the Brocade VDX 6720 and 6730 switches achieved the lowest power consumption levels among reviewed top-of-rack systems, while delivering best-in-class performance and low latency across a variety of workloads and test scenarios.