Emulex and Brocade have agreed to jointly develop and align their roadmaps around a new generation of advanced Gen 6 (32Gb) Fibre Channel networking solutions, enabling increased network performance, higher scalability and improved reliability for the highly virtualised datacentre.
 
Emulex recently announced support for Brocade ClearLink diagnostics, which ensures the reliability and management of storage network configurations. Brocade, for its part, is supporting Emulex Gen 5 Flash Services, including ExpressLane, which provides Quality of Service (QoS) capabilities for flash/solid state disk (SSD)-based storage. Emulex CrossLink provides in-band message passing between server nodes, delivering optimized performance using lossless, standards-based FC protocols. 
 
Emulex and Brocade will partner to develop end-to-end 32GFC-based solutions that will improve performance and scalability to support the demands of highly virtualized datacentres and flash/SSD-based applications.
 
The two vendors are delivering ClearLink, an advanced end-to-end diagnostic solution that performs in-band tests on both Brocade Gen 5 FC switches and Emulex Gen 5 FC HBAs, which can detect problems with the physical cabling and optics that could result in increased error rates and intermittent problems.
          
They will also work together to create solutions that highlight Emulex’s ExpressLane and CrossLink technology which is designed to enhance the QoS, optimize I/O performance and increase return on investment (ROI) in IT environments using fabric-based flash arrays and server-based cache.