San Jose, California - (The Hosting News) - May 18, 2007 - Managed web hosting services company, Rackspace, has chosen to utilize Brocade’s directors, switches, and software, to enhance its growth, simplify management, improve overall power efficiency, and reduce costs.

In addition, Rackspace will engage the Brocade Fabric Manager software, to streamline management of its storage and backup SANs, in order to enable cost reduction on operational costs and offer customers more reliable access to data.

Chad Smykay, Storage Engineer at Rackspace Managed Hosting explained, ‘’As one of the fastest-growing managed hosting providers internationally, our success depends on harnessing technologies that help us sustain our customer service levels. Brocade provided us with the expandable, easy-to-manage SAN solutions we need to manage our services more efficiently and cost-effectively as we grow.'’

To fulfill its mission of providing easily manageable, customized solutions tailored to the business needs of its customers, Rackspace has continually added new services, including the Managed Backup and Storage Division, launched in 2001. Initially, the division deployed dual SAN fabrics, one to support storage services and the other to support backup tape libraries. The division proved to be an instant success, with thousands of Rackspace customers subscribing to the new services.

With demand for its storage offerings surging, the company decided to add new Brocade SAN solutions to support the division’s increasing capacity and port requirements. Beginning in 2003 and continuing into early 2006, Rackspace began implementing a wide range of Brocade SAN solutions, including Brocade 4900 Switches, Brocade 4100 Switches, and Brocade 48000 Directors. A Brocade Professional Services engineer validated the installations.

Mr. Smykay continued, ‘’Choosing Brocade to increase our SAN capacity was an easy decision. Their systems have performed reliably for us and most importantly have enabled us to easily provision new customers and to help us maintain the industry-leading service for which we are known.'’

The Brocade 48000 Directors serve as the building blocks for the Managed Storage and Backup Division’s centralized, high-capacity SAN fabric. The directors scale non-disruptively from 32 to as many as 384 concurrently active 4 Gbit/sec full-duplex ports, and integrate easily with the company’s heterogeneous Linux and Microsoft Windows server environment. The Brocade 4900 Switches provide reliable 4 Gbit/sec performance and feature “pay-as-you-grow” scalability from 32 to 64 ports through flexible Ports on Demand capabilities. The Brocade 4100 Switches also provide industry-leading 4 Gbit/sec performance and scale up to 32 ports using the same Ports on Demand capability as the Brocade 4900.

Mr. Smykay added, ‘’The power consumption of Brocade directors and switches has always been excellent, and it always seems to be improving. When we moved to the new Brocade 48000s, power consumption dropped by more than 50 percent, which is a huge benefit. When you have thousands of storage and backup clients, even a dollar a day savings per device can quickly add up.'’

Concurrent to deploying the new directors and switches, Rackspace implemented Brocade Fabric Manager to optimize administration of its storage and backup SANs. Brocade Fabric Manager is a comprehensive software solution for central-site provisioning, monitoring, and administration of large numbers of switches and multiple Brocade SAN fabrics. The solution enables Rackspace to reduce the time and costs of managing its SAN fabrics.

Mr. Smykay offered, ‘’When you have 60-plus switches and directors, it’s a challenge to perform operations like troubleshooting and firmware upgrades manually. Fabric Manager lets us make global changes and updates from a central location faster, enabling us to respond more rapidly to customers’ issues and increase our productivity. We believe that the Brocade SAN solution provides the fundamental building block for a large and growing business,” Smykay concluded. “It allows us to add devices and servers incrementally, which should in turn allow us to stay ahead of the growth curve and sustain our success.'’

Brocade is a provider of networked storage solutions that help organizations connect, share, and manage their information. Organizations that use Brocade products and services are better able to optimize their IT infrastructures and ensure compliant data management.

A recognized leader in the global managed hosting market, Rackspace Managed Hosting is a service organization delivering enterprise-level web infrastructure and managed services to businesses of all sizes. Serving more than 10,000 customers across seven data centers worldwide, Rackspace integrates the industry’s best technologies for each customer need and delivers it as a service via the company’s award-winning Fanatical Support. Founded in 1998, Rackspace has grown more than 50 percent a year since the company’s inception.

For more information about Brocade, please visit: www.brocade.com.

To learn more about Rackspace Managed Hosting, please visit: www.rackspace.com.