Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN Powers Rackspace Global Hybrid Cloud

SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - Mar 4, 2014) - Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced that Rackspace (NYSE: RAX), the open cloud company, has completed the deployment of Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN solutions across its global data center network to accommodate explosive customer growth. The new Gen 5 Storage Area Network (SAN) has helped the company achieve greater density, flexibility and scale in connecting to high-performance EMC storage arrays, resulting in increased efficiency and productivity at each data center.

Rackspace is a global leader in hybrid cloud computing and founder of OpenStack, the open-source operating system for the cloud. Hundreds of thousands of customers look to Rackspace to deliver the best-fit infrastructure for their IT needs, leveraging a product portfolio that allows workloads to run where they perform best -- whether on the public cloud, private cloud, dedicated servers, or a combination of platforms. Last year, Rackspace also began offering a portfolio of security and network offerings based on the Brocade Vyatta vRouter software network appliance that delivers increased security, as well as network address translation and routing.

To facilitate the company's move to a campus-style data center model, Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel director-class switches were deployed to allow Rackspace to simplify their SAN infrastructure and create a denser environment that enables more ports per square foot of data center space, which has improved efficiency and productivity at each location. Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN switches are now deployed in eight of Rackspace's data centers across three continents as a foundation to connect EMC storage and Dell servers to their customer's remote IT environments.

"Rapid customer growth and their changing needs for supporting highly virtualized environments required an upgrade to our global SAN infrastructure," said Sean Wedige, CTO, Enterprise Solutions, at Rackspace. "We worked with Brocade and EMC Corporation to design a SAN fabric that was easy to grow and manage, while providing the flexibility to allow our data center technicians to connect any device to any switch in the fabric. In addition to improved reliability and availability, the new Brocade SAN fabric has allowed us to use less space and power, supporting our green initiatives, while allowing us better utilization of our physical facilities."