EMC and Brocade announced a deal to deliver data center network convergence, application oriented virtualization, and back up and recovery.

The firms are also working to test faster software integration and deployments.

In a statement the companies said: "EMC and Brocade joint engineering efforts will deliver solutions to simplify the evolution of the data centre to provide additional cost efficiency within the data centre in four areas:

ÔÇó Consolidation: Network protocol convergence utilising Brocade DCX Backbone solutions to unify Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) and Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) protocols as well as enhanced performance and reduced energy consumption through EMC tiered storage and Enterprise Flash Drives.
ÔÇó Application-oriented Virtualisation: Providing infrastructure solutions for enterprise applications such as Microsoft Office SharePoint Server and Microsoft Exchange Server enabled by Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V and VMware.
ÔÇó Application-aware protection: Heterogeneous data movement and consistent-recovery with EMC RecoverPoint and Brocade storage networking connectivity, as well as data centre secure encryption utilising RSA Key Manager.
ÔÇó Next-generation backup and recovery: Unified backup and recovery management with EMC NetWorker├« as well as advanced data deduplication with EMC Avamar ├«and EMC Disk Library to reduce backup costs and speed recovery.

EMC and Brocade have committed to EMC's network of global Solution Centres where the teams will design, test and document integrated technology architectures and configuration guides. It will focus on end-to-end testing of real world Oracle, Microsoft, and SAP environments built upon Brocade's DCX Backbone platform and EMC technology, including the new EMC Symmetrix V-Max and EMC CLARiiON CX4 now shipping 8 Gb/s FC UltraFlex connectivity, EMC qualified Brocade 8Gb/s Fibre Channel host bus adapters (HBAs) as well as end-to-end management and security software from RSA, representing the building blocks of a virtualised infrastructure.