Networking vendor Brocade announced its endorsement of a new Fibre Channel standard currently being developed to provide 16Gbps performance by storage networking solutions. The company expects to roll out the first end-to-end 16Gbps FC product portfolio in the first half of 2011.

Brocade says its solutions currently occupy 67.5 percent of the FC switch and director market, which means its endorsement will carry a lot of weight in spurring future adoption of the new FC-PI-5 standard.

Brocade’s VP of data center products Doug Ingraham said the company chairs the T11 technical committee within the International Committee for Information Technology Standards. The technical committee is tasked with development of standards for FC interfaces.

“With the introduction of the new 16 Gbps Fibre Channel standard, we are effectively future-proofing the data center to enable hyper-scale virtualization for emerging workloads and private storage clouds, while protecting billions of dollars in existing infrastructure investments,” Ingraham said in a statement.

According to the vendor, 16Gbps FC plays a key role in large-scale data centers and solid-state storage. The company’s “aggressive” investment in FC networking solutions is a play to help customers address rising storage demands, data center consolidation and growing encryption and compression requirements.

Brocade’s existing FC storage networking solutions include its flagship 4Gbps and 8Gbps DCX Backbone family and SAN directors, switches and host bus adapters. Brocade solutions have supported FC technology throughout its evolution from 1Gbps, 2Gbps, 4Gbps and 8Gbps.

T11’s target date for initial public review of the new standard is June 2011, according to the committee’s 2008 proposal for development of the standard.