New Brocade Offerings Target Cloud Migrations

Brocade (BRCD) has rolled out new features for its VCS fabric and VDX switch portfolio, seeking to offer an end-to-end multitenancy blueprint for migration to the cloud. New wrinkles include new VCS fabric features that provide native multitenancy, storage-aware networking and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) performance. Last May the company rolled out its software-defined networking strategy, with software innovations coming from its acquisition of Vyatta.

"As cloud computing matures and is increasingly adopted in production environments, new requirements are emerging and deficiencies in legacy architectures are becoming more pronounced," said Jason Nolet, vice president data center swtiching and routing at Brocade. "Our continued innovation in Brocade VCS Fabric technology addresses the most challenging data center requirements, including network multitenancy, network intelligence for exploding storage growth and the emerging adoption of 100 GbE for ever-increasing bandwidth consumption."

The VCS Virtual Fabric now automatically recognizes and prioritizes storage traffic. A new VDX 6740 family of 10/40 GbE switches with VCS Virtual Fabric support offer 40GbE to 160 GbE trunks, with 32 Flex Ports (Fibre Channel/Ethernet/FCoE), providing flexibility and investment protection. The switches also have ASIC support for OpenFlow 1.3. Brocade also announced a new 100 GbE line card for the VDX 8770 modular chassis.

“The ability to securely isolate tenants in a shared infrastructure environment is paramount to today’s cloud-service providers and to enterprises adopting private cloud," said Brad Casemore, Research Director, Data Center Networks at IDC. "Traditional approaches to network segmentation have been around for years, and virtualization and cloud computing have exposed their inherent limitations, especially in relation to flexibility and scalability. Technologies such as Brocade’s VCS Virtual Fabric promise to address this challenge by delivering multitenancy at scale, enabling enterprises to maximize the number of tenants they can support by leveraging segmentation constructs with which network administrators are familiar, thus minimizing both the learning curve and operational overhead.”

New Vyatta 5600 vRouter

Brocade also announced a new Vyatta 5600 vRouter, as an addition to its NFV (Network Function Virtualization) product portfolio. The new router leverages Brocade vPlane technology, which is capable of 10 Gbps throughput per x86 core. For carriers, cloud providers and enterprises alike it directly addresses use cases such as BGP routing, ACL offload and Virtual BGP Route Reflection, among others. The Vyatta 5600 allows for extremely cost-efficient networking power, by leveraging software instead of deploying purpose-built hardware.

“In proof-of-concept tests with large carriers, we are seeing a CapEx savings potential of 90 percent or more when replacing purpose-built hardware with a high-performance x86 server and the Brocade Vyatta vRouter," said Kelly Herrell, vice president and general manager, Software Networking Business at Brocade. "This system architecture shift is central to the larger pursuit of NFV architectures where CapEx and OpEx advantages go hand-in-hand with radical improvements in network service agility and time-to-service.”