News

Brocade Weaves Vision for On-Demand Data Center

Native multitenancy at scale, storage-aware networking, and 100 GbE performance top the list of features.

• By Christa Ayer
• 10/07/2013

Networking solutions vendor Brocade has announced a number of significant advancements to its VCS Fabric technology and VDX switch portfolio, focusing on multitenancy, network intelligence, and throughput performance. Brocade has also unveiled a blueprint for delivering scalable data center multitenancy, from the server to the WAN.

Brocade VCS fabrics help automate the network itself, as well as provide zero-touch virtualization. The fabric is automatically aware of all devices – servers, switches, appliances – within its domain. Without any manual configuration, organizations can add and remove switches from a VCS fabric. Brocade VCS fabrics are designed with logically centralized management and appear as a single switch to the rest of the network, which in itself can further reduce management complexity.

Via a network-based approach to scalable multitenancy, VCS Virtual Fabric employs standards-based network segmentation techniques. It's an approach that the company claims can minimize disruption to operational and organizational models, that requires little to no training, and allows for easy adoption within the enterprise. It's also a hypervisor-agnostic solution, and supports cloud orchestration frameworks through open APIs.

Network intelligence advancements include a new VCS fabric capability, VCS AutoQoS, that automatically recognizes and prioritizes storage traffic, reducing capital and operational costs by allowing for a converged data and storage network design.

In the bandwidth/storage arena, Brocade is introducing the VDX 6740 family of 10/40 GbE switches. Customers can expect a host of new and upgraded features, including: 40 GbE to 160 GbE trunks offering the industry's highest uplink capacity in a leaf switch; 32 Flex Ports (Fibre Channel/Ethernet/FCoE); 24 MB deep buffers with dynamic buffering; ASIC support for OpenFlow 1.3; and support for 10 GbE and 10GBASE-T.