SAN JOSE: "We are pleased to announce the acquisition of Rhapsody Networks. The powerful combination of Rhapsody's advanced technology and talented engineering team, coupled with Brocade's market leadership, installed base, experience, and partner ecosystem will further solidify Brocade's position as the reference platform of choice and accelerate the next phase of the SAN market's evolution," said Greg Reyes, Brocade Chairman and CEO. As the result of this acquisition, Brocade expects to deliver to market a new class of intelligent fabric application switches, which will be fully interoperable with the Brocade SilkWorm family of Fibre Channel fabric switches, the company claimed. Brocade will work with leading OEM and application partners to enable next-generation fabric applications, including fabric-based volume management, fabric-based data replication, and fabric-based data management. These new fabric applications will significantly extend the functionality, simplify management, and reduce the operational cost and complexity of managing and administering existing storage environments. By simply adding a new fabric application switch to an existing Brocade fabric, SAN customers will multiply the benefit of their investment in Brocade infrastructure. The Rhapsody intelligent fabric application development platform is available today to OEM partners. Brocade estimates that the first fabric applications based on these platforms will be available from specific OEM partners by the end of calendar year 2003. The Rhapsody architecture is highly complementary to Brocade fabric switches. In addition to hosting fabric applications directly, it supports multiple protocols -- including Fibre Channel and IP -- and is accessed through an open API. The API will be integrated with the Brocade Fabric Access API to deliver a complete solution for the development of storage and data management applications. "Through this open, intelligent platform for fabric applications, SAN customers will be able to centralize data management by integrating fabric applications into their existing environments, while protecting their investment in Brocade SAN infrastructure. The intelligent platform will provide our OEM and application partners with an increased market opportunity for new revenue from innovative fabric-based applications," Reyes said.