Brocade and Ciena team up for SAN disaster recovery systems

Brocade is using Ciena's FlexSelect technology to aggregate 4Gbit/s channels over fibre

Fibre Channel (FC) vendor Brocade and comms vendor Ciena are collaborating on hardware to help firms with business continuity and disaster recovery.

The systems combine Brocade's 4Gbit/s SAN switches, such as the SilkWorm 48000 SAN Director, with either Ciena's CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform or their CN 2000 Storage Extension Platform.

Connectivity options on the platform include wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM), Sonet/SDH and Gigabit Ethernet. Brocade's SAN switches allow load balanced inter-switch links (ISLs) on a single WDM system; and Ciena's FlexSelect system can aggregate three 4Gbit/s channels per wavelength over optical fibre.

The collaboration follows a recent tie-up between competing FC vendor McData, application acceleration vendor Riverbed Technologies and network storage vendor FalconStor, which last month announced systems using rebranded Riverbed Steelhead appliances for WAN connectivity.

Ciena's CN 4200 FlexSelect Advanced Services Platform has already been chosen by BT as part of its 21st Century Network to move the its public switched telephone network (PSTN) to IP.