Brocade offers fabric platform to OEMs, ISVs

Storage vendor Brocade has made its flagship fabric application platform available to its OEM and developer partners worldwide.

The US-based SAN company has announced general availability to partners of its Brocade SilkWorm Fabric application platform, on display at Storage Networking World Sydney today.

Brocade claimed the platform was the industry's first intelligent switching platform. It is designed to host SAN fabric-based storage management applications such as volume management, data migration and data replication.

The vendor also announced it would offer a set of multi-protocol fabric routing services for the platform. Customers could use the services to consolidate SAN islands to extend their functionality, Brocade claimed in a statement.

The company said Brocade OEM partners and about 10 ISV partners -- including HP, EMC and Veritas -- were already working with the new application platform.

Brocade quoted Mark Lewis, EMC US executive vice-president, as saying that the SilkWorm Fabric application platform would help it deliver open applications extending the 'value' of automated networked storage environments and simplify fabric-based storage management.

Other fabric-based storage management applications on show at Storage Networking World included remote replication, virtual tape library services and data migration.

Brocade said such new applications should help cut operational cost and complexity in storage management.