High-Performance Brocade Solutions Help Boost JetBlue Airways' Flight Operations and Customer Service

SAN JOSE, Calif., Jan. 9 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. (Brocade(R)) (Nasdaq: BRCD), the world-leading provider of Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions, today announced that JetBlue Airways is using Brocade SilkWorm(R) directors to accelerate access to the key applications that manage its up to 500 flights per day. The Brocade directors' added performance extends to virtually every data system involving passenger services, including reservation, navigation, crew, and maintenance platforms.

The scalable directors also deliver the bandwidth to support the self- styled carrier's next decade of growth. For disaster recovery, additional directors and Brocade multiprotocol routing technology complete the fully redundant architecture between data centers, providing a fault-tolerant infrastructure that supports the company's award-winning operations.

"The Brocade SAN's improved throughput is having a rippling effect that is streamlining our entire operations, from flight scheduling and equipment maintenance to managing our flight crews," said Glen Gambal, JetBlue's Manager of Data Center Operations. "As a result, JetBlue's systems are more efficient and we can better ensure flight security and on-time departures."

Founded in 2000, JetBlue began flying passengers from its home base in New York to Florida with a fresh focus on creating a unique brand that combines value, service, and style. Since then, the airline has expanded briskly and today serves 50 cities throughout the United States and the Caribbean with a fleet of 120 aircraft appointed with roomy leather seats and DIRECTV(R) programming live at every seat. This past growth, along with substantial growth planned for the coming years, fueled a project within JetBlue to architect a new data center and networked storage environment to support its expanding operations.

JetBlue recently opened a new Garden City, Long Island data center that is three times the size of the airline's former data center site in Queens, New York. At the new site, JetBlue implemented Brocade directors as the core of its primary SAN. The carrier also standardized on directors for the core of the SAN at its disaster recovery site in Salt Lake City, Utah. The directors provide the highest levels of performance and availability while allowing for modular, seamless growth compared to the switch-only architecture that had served the company well for many years.

"We've used Brocade switches for many years with great success and are impressed by their quality and reliability," said Gambal. "Brocade staff are extremely responsive and easy to work with, so when it came time to replace our existing switches, we didn't even consider another vendor. Most importantly, with our new Brocade solution, our applications run considerably faster and the directors' higher port density makes them more affordable to operate and less expensive to scale and upgrade, giving us a lower total cost of ownership."

In addition to the Brocade directors, JetBlue's new data center features several Hewlett-Packard BladeSystem p-Class enclosures, two of which are equipped with redundant Brocade blade switch modules. Overall, the Brocade SAN fabric environment supports just over 90 servers. The blade switch modules are based on common hardware and software, integrating seamlessly into the director-based SAN and supporting Brocade Inter-Switch Link (ISL) Trunking to optimize performance for the 16 server blades. The servers contain applications such as Microsoft Exchange, various proprietary solutions, and systems used for flight navigation, crew information, and airline maintenance.