[By NBC-1TV H. J Yook]Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) has established a new alliance with Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand to provide network switching capabilities for the recently announced High-Performance Supercomputer (HPC) installation at the Australian National University's National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) data centre.

To support the organization‘s operations, the NCI Supercomputer must be reliably networked to servers and numerous management devices, which is key to the inclusion of Brocade Ethernet switches as part of Fujitsu’s turnkey solution.

“It was crucial that we selected a partner that not only had experience in high-performance computing, but one that was already capable of providing cost-effective, high-density solutions for both the data centre and supercomputer,” said Phil McCormack, Head of Strategy of Fujitsu Australia and New Zealand. “For the management network of the new NCI Supercomputer at ANU, we selected Brocade as we felt that its switching capability was proven in similar global HPC environments and its pricing configuration represented value that was well ahead of other offerings in the market.”

Fujitsu will deploy Brocade® FastIron® SX Series switches as the high-availability, low-latency core of the data centre management network with 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) fiber connections to the Fujitsu supercomputer and supporting servers. This configuration also features 1 GbE connections to more than 100 Brocade FastIron WS Series switches that provide network access to a wide range of system management and monitoring devices.

“Brocade networking solutions today are integral to the supporting infrastructure at some of the world‘s leading supercomputer facilities, including CERN [the European Organization for Nuclear Research], one of the world’s largest and most respected centres for scientific research in Switzerland, and the Argonne and Los Alamos National Laboratories in the U.S.,” said Graham Schultz, Regional Director Australia and New Zealand, Brocade. “With Brocade now part of Australia‘s high-performance computing future, researchers at the Bureau of Meteorology, CSIRO, ANU and other universities can be assured of dependable access to Fujitsu’s solution for high-end computational services to the Australian research community.”