Brocade (NASDAQ:BRCD) is riding high at HP’s (NYSE:HPQ) Tech Forum in Las Vegas today as it announced that the pair’s partnership has resulted in more than seven million Fibre Channel ports shipped and that HP is now selling a new set of Brocade-HP SAN and server connectivity products.

The first new Brocade product to make its way into HP’s storage networking portfolio is an 8Gbps Fibre Channel host bus adapter (HBA) for HP’s BladeSystem c-Class blade servers. The Brocade 804 Fibre Channel HBA features dual ports, each capable of 1600MBps throughput and 500,000 I/Os per second (IOPS).

According to Herman Chao, Brocade’s senior director of product management for server connectivity, the adapters support Server Application Optimization (SAO) technology to dynamically assign bandwidth to virtualized end ports.

Chao says additional features will be added to Brocade’s adapters in the coming months, including N_Port trunking, which turns two 8Gbps ports into a single logical 16Gbps “fat pipe.”

Next up, HP has added Brocade’s recently announced FC8-64 blade to the StorageWorks lineup as the HP StorageWorks B-Series DC SAN Director Blade. As the name indicates, the DC SAN Director has 64 ports with 8Gbps Fibre Channel and support for up to 512 ports per chassis (see “Brocade increases density, throughput of DCX Backbone”).

Lastly, the companies are bundling their products in an effort to create a new SAN Starter Kit based on Brocade’s HBAs and switches and HP’s Modular Smart Array (MSA) SANs.

The HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 Fibre Channel MSA Virtualization Starter Kit includes six HBAs, two switches, a dual-controller version of the HP P2000 G3 SFF Fibre Channel array, and the necessary cables and transceivers to deploy a full 8Gbps Fibre Channel SAN (see “HP refreshes entry-level, LeftHand SANs”).

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