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Brocade Extends Ethernet Fabric Leadership with New Innovations
Published Feb 24, 2014
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With the industry’s largest Ethernet fabric installed base of more than 1,700 customers worldwide and more than 550,000 Brocade® VDX® switch ports shipped, Brocade continues to innovate and advance its leadership in Ethernet fabrics. Brocade announced today the availability of its multitenant solutions, including VCS Virtual Fabric, and new additions to the Brocade VDX switch portfolio, broadening its suite of cloud-optimized, fabric-enabled switches.
According to Gartner, “traditional data center physical networks deploy primarily "access, aggregation, core" architecture, with Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) for topology management and device base provisioning and operation model. Such architecture and model will not meet the demands of modern data centers.”
Brocade recognized this more than three years ago, and set out to transform networking by delivering a highly automated, efficient, VM-aware Ethernet fabric architecture that provides the ideal network foundation for virtualized, cloud-based data centers. The innovations being announced today extend this vision with enhanced capabilities that address new data center imperatives, such as network virtualization, and evolving network requirements in Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and enterprise data centers.
An emerging requirement for both CSPs and enterprises that offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the ability to provide multitenancy support at scale to ensure each tenant’s traffic remains private while sharing a common infrastructure. To address this requirement, Brocade has developed two multitenant solutions: VCS Virtual Fabric and the VCS Fabric Gateway for VMware NSX.
Brocade also expanded its flagship VDX portfolio with new VCS Fabric-enabled switches based on Brocade’s next-generation ASIC. The new products include the industry’s first fabric-based 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) top-of-rack switch that can be upgraded to 10 GbE through a software license, offering customers unmatched investment protection. In addition, Brocade announced a complete suite of next-generation line cards for the Brocade VDX 8770 chassis switch ranging from 10 GbEBase-T to 100 GbE.
News Highlights:
Choice of Multitenant Solutions Provide Network Architecture Flexibility
o Available now, Brocade VCS Virtual Fabric is a key feature of Brocade VCS Fabric technology supported on Brocade VDX next-generation switches. An alternative to overlay networks, VCS Virtual Fabric attributes include:
> Provides a native, network-based approach to multitenant scale enabling data center operators to retain full network visibility utilizing their existing tools.
> Offers a highly evolutionary approach to multitenancy that minimizes disruption to current data center operational and organizational models.
> Is hypervisor agnostic, ideal for customers who may be considering more than one hypervisor vendor in their data center.
> Provides automated tenant provisioning through open APIs and OpenStack.
o Brocade also announced today that it is engaged in in-depth customer trials with its VCS Fabric Gateway for VMware NSX, with general availability planned for March 2014. In collaboration with VMware, Brocade developed this integrated and high-performance gateway solution for customers who prefer overlay architectures, such as VMware NSX, to virtualize their networks. Solution benefits include:
> Unifies virtual and physical environments by converting tunnel connections into IP connections for bare metal servers running non-virtualized applications, physical storage devices or specialized hardware running network services.
> Provides orchestration support for network provisioning and automation through Brocade VDX Ethernet fabric switches and VMWare NSX hypervisors.
> Delivers gateway-level robustness allowing multiple VDX Ethernet fabric switches to be connected to support mission critical applications.
Next Generation VDX Platforms
o Brocade VDX 6740T-1
> Fixed 48 × 1 GbEBase-T ports upgradable to 10 GbEBase-T
> Unparalleled value: Industry’s lowest-cost entry point into Ethernet fabric
o Brocade VDX 8770 Modules
> 6 × 100 GbE port module: The industry’s first and only offering to support 100 GbE Ports on Demand (PoD) capabilities within Ethernet fabrics, designed for emerging 100 GbE deployments in the heart of the data center
> 27 × 40 GbE port module: For dense 40 GbE spine/middle-of-row deployments, this module is optimized with large buffers to absorb microburst traffic in data centers
> 48 × 10 GbEBase-T port module: For dense 10 GbE leaf/middle-of-row deployments, this module is designed to cut CapEx by supporting 1/10 GbE connectivity directly on copper interfaces, without the need for more expensive optics
Pricing
The Brocade VDX 6740T-1 starts at $14,995. The Brocade VDX 8770 starts at $45,000 for the 48x10G-T, rising to $60,000 for the VDX 8770-27x40G and then $96,000 for the VDX8770-6x100G.
Quotes
Jason Nolet, vice president data center switching and routing, Brocade
“Legacy network architectures are no longer able to cope with the rigorous demands that modern data centers are placing on them. As both enterprises and services providers move to cloud architectures, the need to rethink the legacy data center network has become apparent. Brocade VCS Fabric technology offers the ideal network foundation for the modern data center, addressing the most challenging data center requirements, including network automation and native network multitenancy at scale, with the most robust end-to-end portfolio of data center fabric solutions. With this announcement, Brocade is furthering its leadership in Ethernet fabrics, enabling customers to deploy an automated networking architecture that can radically improve business efficiency and agility, delivering 50 percent lower OpEx over competitive alternatives.”
Katsutoshi Fukuzawa, General Manager, Cloud Infrastructure Dept., Bit-Isle.
“Multitenancy support is a mandatory requirement for today’s data center and cloud infrastructure. We appreciate Brocade’s Virtual Fabric, which can help us easily deliver large-scale and highly intelligent multitenancy services. The result of the testing of this new capability turned out to be quite impressive. We learned that Virtual Fabric had the same semantics as standard VLANs and didn’t require any new skills. We also found it compelling that Virtual Fabric could be seamlessly enabled in our existing VDX environment because of VCS Fabric Technology. With Brocade VDX switches and VCS Fabric Technology, we were able to reduce workload and time for network management and configurations, making our data center network more simple and resilient.”
Robert Darrow, Vice President Operations, Peak, the industry’s leading channel-focused cloud provider.
“Future-proofing the data center is no easy task. We invest significant resources in ensuring that our vendors are able to support our immediate and long-term strategic requirements. When it comes to the network this approach is of critical importance, and with Brocade Ethernet fabrics we know that we have a solution that will scale and evolve as our business evolves. Being able to easily upgrade from 1GbE to 10GbE speeds without replacing hardware is highly attractive to us, and VCS Fabric Technology brings the simplicity, reliability and level of automation that we need to drive our business.”
Ian McClarty, President, PhoenixNAP
“The Virtual Fabric feature of Brocade’s VCS Fabric technology was highly attractive to us, as it removed the scalability problems inherent with traditional multi-tenant segmentation techniques. The whole solution was very simple to deploy, and helped us radically simplify our environment.”
Posted by
VMD - [Virtual Marketing Department]
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