With all-flash arrays becoming part of the furniture in data centers, network switch makers are leveraging the technology as a way to ease network bottlenecks and adapt to new, data-driven workloads.

A case in point is Brocade Communications Systems, Inc., which upgraded its Fiber Channel switches on Tuesday with 32 gigabytes per second performance and a new feature that monitors virtual machines’ performance.

The Brocade G610 storage switch, built atop of the company’s sixth-generation Fiber Channel technology, is designed to connect VMs with servers in all-flash data centers. Meanwhile, the performance boost will facilitate more demanding application workloads, the company said.

What with the accelerating adoption of flash storage and also non-volatile memory express, or NVMe, technology in the data center, companies have “new requirements for a modern infrastructure that can optimize application performance,” the company said. As such, its new sixth-generation Fiber Channel storage area network is built to provide “non-stop availability and built-in NVMe for all-flash datacenters.”

Companies can use the new switch for a range of purposes, including network edge deployments and shared storage fabrics, Brocade said. The biggest benefit is the elimination of performance bottlenecks that are typically seen with disk-based storage hardware,” the company said, by leveraging new networking protocols that allow hardware and software to communicate directly within flash arrays. The end result is that Brocade reckons its new switches combined with NVMe technology can reduce network latency by as much as 55 percent.

A second benefit is the new monitoring feature. Brocade’s sixth-generation switch is able to monitor storage input/output performance and simultaneously track VM performance across the storage fabric. This allows network administrators to set thresholds for VM flows and provision networks based on their VM requirements. That ensures greater visibility into app performance at the VM level, Jack Rondoni, Brocade’s senior vice president of storage networking, said in a statement.

Brocade said its new G610 switch is available now, through it and its channel partners, which include Dell EMC Inc., Fujitsu Ltd., Hitachi Data Systems, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co, Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., Lenovo Group Ltd., Pure Storage Inc. and VMware Inc.

Image: Brocade