The Brocade 48000 Director, designed to help enterprises share and secure critical data in data centers, receives the Gold in TechTarget's annual Storage Product of the Year Awards program.Brocade Communications Systems announced Feb. 9 that its SAN platform, the Brocade 48000 Director, has been awarded the Gold in TechTargets annual Storage Product of the Year Awards Program.
"This is an important validation of years of feedback from our customers and partners on what is required for mission-critical storage area networking directors," Bryan Young, director of Enterprise Business for Brocade, told eWEEK.
The Brocade 48000 Director is designed to work with various environments such as IBM mainframe, Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX and i5/OS. It features applications for ERP (enterprise resource planning), data warehousing, data backup, remote mirroring and clustering.
Available since June 2005, the Brocade 48000 Director includes configuration options, optional software features, port blades with three densities, an iSCSI (Internet SCSI) gateway blade for enterprise iSCSI, Fibre Channel connectivity, Brocades secure Fibre Channel routing blade, long-distance capabilities and disaster-recovery functionality.
"The Brocade 48000 allows business users to deploy a single, highly available platform in the most complex, mission-critical open systems and mainframe environments," Young said.
This storage platform, currently being offered by Brocade OEM partners such as EMC, Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Sun Microsystems, is also designed to support FCIP (Fibre Channel over IP), which allows for connectivity between remote data centers.
Brocade acquires data-acceleration specialist company Silverback. Click here to read more.
"The Brocade 48000 Director is used by enterprises worldwide as the foundation for mission-critical SAN environments enabling organizations to access and share data in a consolidated, manageable and scalable manner," Young said.
Brocades SAN platform gives users a choice of 16-, 32-, and 48-port blades at 4G-bps connectivity, as well as multiprotocol capabilities and applications, while also having a centralized management feature that includes automatic data routing and rerouting and a remote notification capability that notifies users of system events including error detections and fault isolation facilities.
The SAN platform from Brocade also includes security features that provide secure Telnet access through SSH (Secure Shell), enable hardware-enforced zoning by WWN (World Wide Name) and use Brocade Web tools to secure Internet browsing.
"Scalability, ease of management, high performance and availability, and integration with heterogeneous environments were all key features we built into the Brocade 48000 Director, which we plan on continually enhancing with upcoming generations of new directors," Young said.
The Brocade 48000 is available now, with pricing set by Brocade OEM partners.
Check out eWEEK.coms for the latest news, reviews and analysis on enterprise and small business storage hardware and software.
Data Storage, Data Backup and Storage Virtualization 
