Brocade and Nortel Team Up to Deliver Pre-Tested Optical SANs

Over the past three years, the two companies worked together to conduct interoperability testing between Nortel's DWDM Optera 5100 and 5200 products and Brocade's fabric switches, such as the 2-Gbit/s Brocade Silkworm 3200, 3800, and 12000.

One SAN solution that the companies designed is remote mirroring to replicate data between disks. The second involves remote centralized backup, so that IT managers can consolidate the backup task from multiple data centers to one. Both of those solutions are meant to cover business continuance issues for mission-critical data.

The third solution achieves remote centralized storage for storage consolidation.

"These are all pre-tested and they simulate an environment that a large enterprise would have. It's a recipe for walking a customer through implementation," says Jack Hunt, director of optical storage marketing at Nortel.

Hunt says they are seeing a lot of interest in several vertical markets for storage consolidation, including state and local government, general manufacturing and insurance companies. Some of the earlier storage consolidation adopters include financial institutions, health care and high-tech manufacturering.

"This really hits to what IT [departments are looking for now, to lower their costs," says Gary Bhatia, senior manager of global alliances at Brocade.