Brocade on Tuesday said that IBM will rebrand and sell its networking routers and switches through IBM's direct and indirect sales forces. The line includes nearly all the products Brocade got when it acquired Foundry Networks for $2. The Cisco MDS 9000 platform offers a mainframe IBM fiber connection (FICON) intermix. It includes complete traffic and management isolation and advanced distance extension, quality of service, and scaling. IBM mainframes have been the workhorses of the computing world for almost 50 years and many. Qualification testing is performed to ensure connectivity and interoperability of Fibre Connection (FICON) and Fibre Channel Protocol (FCP) switches and directors with IBM zSystems, as well as to ensure adherence to the FICON architecture and FCP architecture. IBM already resells Brocade's storage. This Application Engineering Note will discuss the different Corning Optical Communications components that are available to provide fiber optic connectivity for the most common input/output communications attachments for IBM Z-platform (Z-13 and Z-14) mainframes. Shenzhen OPTICO Communication Co.