Storage-attached network vendors are beefing up their products to address the rapid increase in data center I/O traffic that the widening adoption of flash arrays is driving. Leading the effort is Brocade Technologies Inc., which today introduced a new director-class switch series that is hailed as the first in the industry to implement the Gen 6 Fibre Channel (FC) protocol.

The standard supports up to 32 GBps of throughput per port and can handle as much as 128 GBps when multiple links are combined into a single lane, which represents a fourfold improvement over the technology’s previous iteration. The protocol enables Brocade’s new X6 Director to handle significantly more traffic than older competing alternatives. It’s available in two configurations on launch: A midsize model referred to as the X6-4 that packs 192 32 Gbps ports when fully loaded, and a high-end version called X6-8 with precisely twice as much network capacity. The latter switch is able to provide up to 16 TBps of aggregate bandwidth when accounting for the 32 dedicated 128 GBps ports that are there for connecting with other director nodes.

Brocade says that the X6 series is geared towards petabyte-scale environments like large Hadoop clusters where a lot of data moves between the server and storage components. Its value proposition is simple: The high density of the new directors reduces the total number of nodes required for a deployment and thereby cuts management overhead. Jack Rondoni, the head of Brocade’s storage networking business, elaborated in an interview with SilconANGLE this week.

“I always say performance enables consolidation,” he told SiliconANGLE’s Jeff Frick. “Say you have 10 switches– we can get you down to 2 switches. If you want to save OpEx, you want to manage less things. And we’re able to go do that. “

Reducing the amount of networking equipment that organizations need to deploy also eases day-to-day maintenance in the process, which frees up administrators to focus on activities. And Brocade claims that the benefit can be compounded using Fabric Vision, a monitoring toolkit it included in the X6 series to help troubleshoot technical problems. The software promises to provide visibility into traffic and storage bottlenecks that are hurting application performance.

Brocade’s Rondoni described the software as “Google Maps for the storage workloads of an enterprise” to Frick. “It’s vitally important because you’re dealing with petabyte scale, which most enterprises are,” he continued. “When customers deploy Gen 6, what they can do that they couldn’t do with previous generations is view the I/O workflow of their entire environments. And that’s important for maintain SLAs. Because the applications that these enterprises run, if they slow down, there’s major impact.”

Image via Geralt