The updates to the 12000 were announced at the company’s user conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, alongside improvements to Brocade’s switch and director operating system and management software that cover areas including security, and HBA firmware distribution.
OEM suppliers of the 12000 have been shipped with firmware updates that provide the trinity of high-end functions widely identified as necessary – but missing until now – to justify Brocade’s description of the device as director class. These are the ability to accept hot code updates, support for the FICON mainframe protocol, and instantaneous controller failover.
These OEMs are likely to complete qualification testing of the new software in the current quarter. The FICON support is likely to be qualified by IBM Corp in the third quarter.
Brocade admitted yesterday that until now the lack of these features has limited sales of the 12000 – to at least some extent.
There are definitely customers who have had religion about this, said Derek Granath, director of product marketing for the company. It’s not the biggest part of the market, but it’s not trivial. There were deals we were definitely closed out of, he said.
Earlier this month Brocade cited figures published by researcher Dell’Oro as third-party confirmation of its claim that the 12000 has captured over 40% of the market for director-class SAN switches since its launch around a year ago.
The Fabric OS operating system that runs Brocade’s switches and directors has been augmented with a security system that uses digital certificates and encrypted management commands to protect storage networks against both external hackers, and internal blunderers.
By requiring switches to present digital certificates before they can be linked into a SAN, and maintaining authorization lists of which servers can access which data, Brocade says its customers will be protected against configuration errors as much as malicious hackers.
Really this is much more about integrity than security, said Steve Daheb, senior director of product marketing at Brocade.
In its Fabric Manager software, the company introduced a facility that allows code updates to be automatically and single keystroke distributed to Emulex HBAs. Emulex has by the far the largest market share of all Fibre Channel HBA suppliers.
The software update has also increased the sophistication with which administrators’ individual access rights can be controlled, and now allows customers access to a CLI so that they can write custom scripts.
Source: Computerwire
