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SCMP Reporter

Brocade Communications Systems, an infrastructure provider for storage area networks (SANs), expects China to generate more revenue in the future than the rest of the Asia-Pacific region combined.

Research firm International Data Corp has predicted the storage market in Asia-Pacific would grow more than 79.5 per cent from this year to 2005.

Brocade president and chief operating officer Michael Byrd said the Asia-Pacific market accounted for about 15 per cent of the firm's sales worldwide.

'With the expected growth in China, we see there is a potential to make up 30 per cent of regional business within 12 to 16 months,' he said.

James LaLonde, vice-president for Asia-Pacific, said: 'Our major investment would be in Greater China and Japan.

'It [China] is the most vibrant market. There are more opportunities than we have people to chase after [them]. The people are very hungry to learn. They are very much interested in technology.

'There is high demand, not only for products, but also the information about the products, like how to use SANs and what can be taken from SANs.'

Mr LaLonde said the situation now was different to the past. 'Before, when there were only state-owned enterprises dominating, there was not so much emphasis on the return on investment, as basically the money came from the state.

'But now the concepts which make sense to [United States] IT managers also make sense to Chinese IT managers because of WTO and the Westernisation of China.'

Brocade established its Beijing office last month and partnered with Beijing Tsinghua University to set up a joint SAN technology laboratory. It will fund a SAN scholarship programme to foster the development of local SAN expertise. The university will also add SAN to its curriculum.

'We have been building the local versions of our international partnership - that is our first step,' Mr LaLonde said.

'We have also been talking to end-users at major banks and in the telco industry to meet their demand.'

Meanwhile, Brocade has released the SilkWorm 3800 enterprise fabric switch, the first two gigabit per second product for SANs. Companies can use the fabric switch to connect servers with storage devices through a SAN.

The 16-port fabric switch 'increases SAN scalability and reliability, enhances the security of the SAN fabric, and simplifies storage network management', according to Mr Byrd.

'Before, we only had product of one gigabit. Our latest technology has not only doubled its speed, with our inter-switch link, it also allows trunking of multiple links within fabrics - from two gigabit to eight gigabit per second.'

The product is compatible with other Brocade fabric switches and has more than one million fibre channel ports. 'It allows existing Brocade customers to seamlessly migrate from one to two gigabit per second SAN environments and deploy a reliable core-to-edge storage networking infrastructure,' said Mr Byrd.

SAN is a technology enabling disparate storage computing resources to be shared so organisations can achieve continuous and faster access to digital data. A typical SAN set-up includes a communications infrastructure to link servers and storage devices, and a management system to smooth connections so all data transmission remains secure.



Mainland storage market key for Brocade