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RSS feedsStorage area network (SAN) specialist Brocade launched new server management and wide area file services tools at its user conference in California, in May. The new offerings and their Tapestry brand name mark something of a sea change at Brocade, which until now has focused tightly on SAN switching hardware. The firm's Silkworm brand of SAN switches is one of the leaders in the storage infrastructure market.
Eric Sheppard of analyst firm IDC said, "Brocade is part of the infrastructure for SANs in many large firms, which puts it in a good place for this type of offering. But Brocade will appear as a new name to most people and that will be its biggest challenge. Partnering with system suppliers is going to be very important for the success of this move."
Brocade's Tapestry Application Resource Manager (ARM) is a software module that runs on Brocade's new Intelligent Application Platform. Uli Plechschmidt, Brocade vice-president, said Tapestry ARM manages the relationship between server hardware, applications, operating system and storage.
"Firms are likely to have a range of different systems from different vendors. It's time-consuming to load operating system, service packs, applications, Fibre Channel adapter firmware, network settings, etc. With our ARM you can create images that are stored on the SAN and assign those images to servers." This approach is particularly suited to servers that boot from a SAN, including diskless blade servers, Plechschmidt added.
Chris Ingle of research firm IDC said, "This could improve on some of the limitations of existing systems - for example, it could work faster. But it's not clear how well this would fit in with any existing server management tools such as IBM Tivoli or HP OpenView."
Brocade also launched a pair of Tapestry wide area file services (Wafs) appliances designed to reduce the time needed to transfer documents from datacentre file servers to branch offices. The Wafs kit is based on technology acquired when Brocade purchased software firm Therion earlier this year.
Cisco last year launched a pair of Wafs devices, and several other vendors offer similar products. Cisco's product replaces the Windows Cifs protocol with a proprietary alternative designed to operate more efficiently over low bandwidth and high latency WAN links. In contrast, Brocade's Wafs offering is based on cacheing technology. "Our key differentiation is the Windows part of it. We use Cifs to move the files back and forth," Plechschmidt said.
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