Dell, Brocade Go After The Enterprise Data Center

Dell continues to expand its presence in the data center, unveiling a deal with Brocade Communication Systems to sell a complete enterprise data center solution focused on unified fabric and storage networking.

The deal between Round Rock, Texas-based Dell and Brocade, San Jose, Calif., allows Dell to stamp its own brand on networking switches from Brocade. The two companies will split the revenue generated by sales of the solution.

The partnership is aimed at developing solutions for customers focused on using virtualization to efficiently manage their data centers as well as developing a toolset that manages application delivery and deployment on networks.

It's a move that is becoming more familiar in the industry. Dell competitor Hewlett-Packard has long played in the server space and Cisco in March unveiled its unified computing systems, which include server elements.

The new partnership between Dell and Brocade expands on a 10-year relationship that was based solely on storage networking.

"We are extending our Brocade relationship beyond storage into the broader data center, offering customers compelling choices and flexibility for compute, networking and storage. Both companies share a vision that next-generation, virtualized data centers should be open and standards-based," Brad Anderson, senior vice president, Dell enterprise product group, said in a statement.

At VMworld in San Francisco Wednesday, the two companies are expected to unveil five products, slated to be available in December.

The Brocade Data Center Fabric Manager provides unified end-to-end management for data center fabrics, covering everything from storage ports on networked storage systems to host-bus adapters attached to physical or virtual servers.

A new Dell switch will be based on the Brocade 8000 FCoE switch and Brocade DCX backbone and will help customers consolidate the data center while addressing data growth and application demands.

A Brocade Fibre Channel host-bus adapter is designed to help customers design an end-to-end storage networking architecture.

Dell will also offer modular switches based on Brocade's NetIron MLX Series Routers and BigIron RX series switches to provide 10 GbE and 1 GbE port density, delivering performance to support data center traffic.

Finally, the Brocade ServerIron ADX series switches provide the foundation of Dell's new application switch that will provide Layer 4 through 7 performance in a modular application delivery controller platform, with an emphasis on secure and scalable service infrastructures.

Dell also unveiled a partnership with Scalent Systems, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based software company. The hardware vendor will sell Scalent software to manage the interaction between the new hardware.

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