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The variety of flash storage systems is similar to farming. Not all farms are alike. Some farms focus on crops and others on livestock. The same goes for flash storage systems. Some arrays are designed for pure speed while others are designed for simplicity and or mass scale. Hitachi designs its Flash Systems for 100% data availability for mission critical business operations. Brocade and Hitachi have been storage networking partners for over 15 years, and we congratulate them on their recent Challenger ranking in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Solid-State Arrays.

As Hitachi Data Systems CTO Hu Yoshida promised last year, HDS is now upgrading its Virtual Storage Platform Flash environments to support Gen 6 Fibre Channel’s 32Gb speeds.

Coupling Hitachi’s new flash systems with Brocade’s Gen 6 Fibre Channel line of switches and directors will extend these mission-critical design and performance capabilities across the network to accelerate data access, and drive always-on business operations. The Brocade Gen 6 Fibre Channel platform includes the X6 director family, the SX6 extension blade, Brocade G620 Switch and new Fabric Vision capabilities: IO Insight and VM Insight, enabling Hitachi Data Systems and their customers meet the 100% data availability guarantee.

Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with IO Insight: Fabric Vision technology overcomes the traditional limitations of network monitoring by introducing IO Insight, the industry's only integrated network sensor that provides deeper visibility into the IO performance of storage infrastructure. This enhanced visibility enables quick identification of degraded application performance at host and storage tiers reducing time to resolution. IO Insight proactively monitors IO performance and behavior to gain unparalleled insight into potential issues and help maintain service levels.

Brocade Fabric Vision Technology with VM Insight: Fabric Vision technology will include VM Insight for unparalleled end-to-end visibility into the storage performance of individual VMs. This feature optimizes VM performance and availability in a virtualized data center. VM Insight uses standards-based VM tagging to enable monitoring of VM-level application performance issues in a Gen 6 Fibre Channel SAN. Using this information, storage administrators can establish baseline application performance and identify anomalies in order to fine-tune the infrastructure to meet service level objectives. VM Insight also enables quick correlation with other Fabric Vision metrics to identify the root cause of problems before operations are affected

In addition to these new management capabilities, customers who have deployed Gen 6 Fibre Channel into their flash architecture have also seen  application response times up to 71 percent better than previous solutions.

Once again, Brocade congratulates Hitachi on their storage leadership and strong partnership.

Click here to learn more about the HDS Virtual Storage Platform.

Watch the video to see how Brocade and HDS combine Gen 6 Fibre Channel and All-Flash storage for real-time, high performance solutions.