HP, Brocade Wield A Switch Blade

The two vendors are working on a rack-mount SAN switch that will consolidate the Fibre Channel storage paths of 16 HP ProLiant server blades, simplifying the management of server blades running off SANs, said Paul Miller, vice president of marketing at HP, Palo Alto, Calif.

The 4-Gbit-per-second embedded SAN switch is expected to ship in the second quarter of 2005, Miller said. Pricing will be announced as the product nears its release date.

Built by San Jose, Calif.-based Brocade and designed specifically for HP BladeSystem architecture, the SAN switch can be managed through a customer's existing Brocade switch interface, just like a Brocade switch cabled into the network, Miller said.

By reducing the number of ports needed to connect racks of blade servers to a SAN, the switch should produce cost savings for customers, Miller said. "From the server silo to the storage silo, there is typically a port charge, and this switch will reduce that cost," he said.

The SAN switch will interoperate with SANs from competing vendors such as EMC, IBM and Hitachi, but HP recommends that the switch be used with HP SANs, Miller said. "It will work first and best through the HP-architectured SAN," he added.

Mitchell Martinez, executive vice president of Derive Technologies, a New York-based VAR that sells solutions wrapped around servers from a wide range of vendors, said the HP-Brocade blade switch would be most appealing to new SAN deployments.

Describing the new offering as a switch from Brocade's Silkworm 4100 family that's integrated into a blade chassis, Martinez said customers with mature SAN infrastructures might be less inclined to opt for an embedded switch because a switching infrastructure likely would already be in place with available ports into the SAN.

"But for those who are adding a new SAN, there is huge opportunity," because the integrated switch will make a SAN easier to deploy, he said.