Brocade's Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions have now been picked up by the company's key OEM partners, including Dell EMC, Fujitsu, HDS and NetApp.

The company says the announcement fits alongside Hitachi Data Systems shipping of Brocade Generation 6 directors, blade and switch since July this year, which demonstrates how Fibre Channel will become the standard for mission-critical enterprise storage.

The Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions include X6 directors, SX6 extension blade and the G620 switch, which can be used with Brocade Vision technology. The company says its solutions enable customers to keep business operations in an 'always-on' mode, as well as eliminating performance bottlenecks and evolving with digital organisations.

"AOL continues to rely on Fibre Channel for storage connectivity to our most critical systems. We recently started the refresh of our existing infrastructure to Gen 6 Fibre Channel. AOL is committed to Fibre Channel for the future when our systems demand extremely high performance and availability," explains Dan Pollack, chief architect of storage operations at AOL.

Brocade says that Gartner research also provides a clear picture that Fibre Channel will be important in the next years.

"Storage networking investments are becoming a critical top priority due to the adoption of high-throughput, solid-state and flash storage…  Storage performance bottlenecks are moving out of arrays and into the storage network, so Fibre Channel will remain as the data center storage protocol of choice for the next decade,” the Gartner report, titled The Future of Storage Protocols, says.

"We are pleased that the recent Gartner report reiterates the importance of Fibre Channel as the data center protocol of choice for storage networking for the foreseeable future," comments Jack Rondoni, vice president of storage networking at Brocade.

The report also details that solid-state drives (SSDs) allow IT leaders to scale application performance and transactions. It also says that storage network upgrades can reduce costs by consolidating the amount of network switches, cables, adaptors or network interface cards.

“Through our OEM partners, including Dell EMC, Fujitsu, HDS and NetApp, we are already delivering Gen 6 Fibre Channel solutions that maximise the performance of flash storage and deliver unprecedented reliability and scalability. We plan to have additional announcements in the coming months as more partners launch our Gen 6 platforms.

Brocade says that Fibre Channel is generally the most reliable and lowest-latency infrastructure for storage, perfect for the all-flash data center, new data center architecture and next-gen storage technologies.