Brocade wins Industry award for storage networking standards
By siliconindia   |   Wednesday, 11 December 2002, 20:30 IST
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SAN JOSE: Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) announced Tuesday that it has been recognized for its contributions to the SAN industry. Steven Wilson, Brocade Principal Engineer, Technology and Standards Engineering Group, and Kumar Malavalli, Brocade Co-Founder and Strategic Advisor, were honored by the InterNational Committee for Informational Technology Standards (INCITS). Additionally, Malavalli was selected for induction into the Silicon Valley Engineering Council (SVEC) Hall of Fame. INCITS is a forum for information technology developers, producers, and users for the creation and maintenance of formal IT standards. In an awards reception held last month in Washington, D.C., Wilson and Malavalli were honored for their contributions to the success of Fibre Channel standards and technology in the storage networking industry. Wilson received the 2002 Technical Excellence Award for his work as the technical editor for Technical Committee T11's FC-SW series of standards, the core documents defining SAN switching infrastructure. Malavalli received the 2002 Gene Milligan Award for Effective Committee Management for his leadership and guidance as the Chair of INCITS Technical Committee T11 in the development of seventeen SAN standards. Both Wilson and Malavalli have played critical roles in the development of unique requirements for Fibre Channel standards, including switching and topologies, security, and interoperability. The SVEC is a non-profit educational organization that assists its member engineering and technical societies in Silicon Valley to better serve its members and the community. The SVEC Hall of Fame Award recognizes engineers and technologists within the Silicon Valley region who have demonstrated outstanding professional achievement and have made significant contributions to Silicon Valley and the Greater Bay Area communities. Malavalli has been a major contributor to the development of Fibre Channel standards and products over the last fifteen years and has been instrumental in the evolution of SANs. A co-founder of Brocade, Malavalli holds several U.S. patents in Fibre Channel technology. Malavalli will be inducted into the SVEC Hall of Fame at a ceremony during the Council's Engineers Week at the Hall of Fame Awards Banquet in February 2003. Past inductees to the SVEC Hall of Fame have included William R. Hewlett, David Packard, Esther Williams, and Robert N. Noyce. "Brocade is committed to developing standards-based solutions and has been a leading contributor and author of technologies for ANSI, and several other organizations, that have become standards within the SAN industry. Some of these standards include Fibre Channel technologies for interoperability, security technologies for authentication, access control and confidentiality, the FCIP standard, and the CIM and the forthcoming SNIA Bluefin SAN management standards," said Jay Kidd, Brocade Vice President of Product Marketing. "In addition, Brocade's work on ANSI T11 specifications, for which Wilson and Malavalli were honored by INCITS, has helped provide a foundation for the industry's SANmark program, an open industry, conformance test suite development program developed by the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA)."

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