APPLICATIONS

STORAGE NETWORKING WORLD, ORLANDO, Fla. -- Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (Brocade(R)), a leading provider of infrastructure solutions for Storage Area Networks (SANs), announced today that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has expanded its Brocade SAN infrastructure, based on the SilkWorm(R) 12000 Core Fabric Switch. NCSA's SAN is designed to handle high-performance data transfer and retrieval for its 80 Terabyte (TB) storage solution. NCSA is also developing specialized storage management applications using the Brocade Fabric Access API to harness the intelligence of the Brocade SAN infrastructure and perform storage management functions not available from traditional SAN management applications, such as tracking SAN performance at the individual port level. A broad-based research center affiliated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, NCSA provides the high-performance computing infrastructure to enable breakthroughs in science and engineering -- for applications that range from modeling earthquakes to probing the cosmos. When the center was challenged with implementing a storage environment that could help store, move, and manage massive amounts of data at extremely high speeds, it decided to migrate from its Direct Attached Storage (DAS) environment to a more flexible Storage Area Network (SAN). Already, NCSA has witnessed a significant performance boost in its data backups and has seen major improvements in the performance of its Windows NT-based Microsoft Exchange e- mail system as a result of the SAN deployment. As part of the SAN implementation, NCSA deployed 60 TB of disk storage, eight Brocade SilkWorm 3800 16-port Enterprise Fabric Switches, and a SilkWorm 12000 Core Fabric Switch. The entire SAN infrastructure features a high-speed 2 Gigabit per Second (Gbit/sec) Fibre Channel data path and provides exceptional performance delivered by 8 Gbit/sec ISL trunking, along with configuration flexibility, enabling NCSA to connect its SAN to more than 200 host servers. In addition, NCSA is also using the Brocade Fabric Access API to develop specialized SAN management functionality to complement their storage management solutions. "Part of the mission of the NCSA is to anticipate what technologies and solutions might be needed five to ten years in the future. This requires us to have an infrastructure that enables our researchers to perform tasks in days or weeks, rather than months or years," said Michelle Butler, Technical Program Manager of the Storage Enabling Technologies Group at NCSA. "Our Brocade-based SAN has enabled us to more than double the throughput of our applications and meet our goal of having a computing environment that is five to six years more advanced than other current environments." One of the largest and most critical projects the SAN will support is the TeraGrid, a large computing infrastructure that will be distributed among five research facilities-NCSA, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, Argonne National Laboratory, the California Institute of Technology, and the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. The goal of the TeraGrid project is to develop a high performance infrastructure that connects computers and other resources, including large-scale data archives. The project's mass storage system, known as the General Purpose File System, will contain over 500 TB and is expected to grow by 20 to 30 TBs each month. "We are pleased that NCSA has chosen us as the intelligent storage networking platform for its data center to provide it with the necessary tools to manage such an immense and complex environment," said Jeffrey Brooks, Brocade Chief Marketing Officer. "The Brocade family of fabric switches and our Fabric Access API continue to help our customers and partners simplify the management, increase the asset utilization, and reduce their total cost of ownership of storage environments."