Monday, 12 November 2007

Microsoft to Feature Brocade Data Center Solutions Technology Centers

Brocade said last week that it has been selected to showcase and demonstrate its data center solutions at Microsoft Technology Centers (MTC) worldwide.

MTC’s provide enterprise customers with the opportunity to evaluate leading edge and customized technology solutions from Microsoft and other leading vendors before deploying the solutions in their own environments.

“By hosting Brocade products in our data centers, the Microsoft Technology Centers enable our customers to evaluate solutions based on Brocade and Microsoft technologies as they make preparations to evolve and build out their next-generation data centers,” said Jens Moberg, Corporate Vice President of the U.S. Enterprise Partner Group, Microsoft.

MTCs are state-of-the-art facilities staffed by technology experts and supported by industry leaders to help customers envision, architect, and demonstrate Microsoft and partner solutions to solve their business problems. MTCs provide three types of offerings – strategy briefings, architecture design sessions, and proof-of-concept workshops – each of which focuses on a different stage of a customer’s search for a solution.

“The Microsoft Technology Centers provide Brocade a valuable opportunity to demonstrate how data centers will evolve in customized, real-world environments,” said Tom Buiocchi, Brocade Vice President of Worldwide Marketing.

“Brocade is enabling data centers of all sizes and helping our customers solve the challenges of unprecedented data growth; data security and protection; and data center efficiency.”

The Brocade suite of Storage Area Network (SAN) infrastructure and server connectivity solutions includes switches, directors, routers, embedded switches for blade servers, fabric-based applications, and Host Bus Adaptors (HBAs), as well as management applications and utilities to centralize data management. Brocade SAN and server connectivity solutions featured in the MTCs include the Brocade 48000 Director, the Brocade Fibre Channel (FC) HBA, and Brocade Access Gateway. Brocade FC SAN products support standards-based N_Port ID Virtualization (NPIV), complementing Microsoft’s virtualization strategy by optimizing blade server and server virtualization solutions with Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager.