Brocade 3.0: Ramping up for smarter data centres

By Cat Yong

Of all the data centre components that are being virtualised like applications, storage, servers and so on, none is creating more news and headlines than networking.

The pipes to carry data traffic within a data centre or between data centres, is complicated business, and with IT workloads expected to increase in size, speed, agility and complexity, these crucial pipes, or rather networking infrastructure technologies and solutions, has their work cut out for them.

Networking solutions provider, Brocade, is getting ready a clear strategy to transform networking and Country Manager for Brocade Malaysia, Sean Ong pointed out, “Brocade has realigned its go-to-market strategy, but there is still consistency in terms of our business strategy and messaging to our partners and customers in the last 8 months or so – data centres.

“That (data centres) is where we are making the biggest inroads,” Ong stated.

For 2013, Brocade has continued to introduce new Ethernet fabric products, and also managed to increase customers in Malaysia; there is already a global total of over 1400 customers, and the San Jose-based company had ended Q3, with “strong momentum.”

According to IDC, Brocade ranks second behind Cisco in data centre networking market share, worldwide.

The past 12 months
The march towards a virtualising neworks is inevitable, and yet far from over. The world is doubling its data every two years, 82% of server workloads are expected to be virtual by 2016 and there is internal pressures to drive cost down.

Ong added, “The Vyatta acquisition last October, it is important to driving our vision for software networking and network function virtualisation (NFV).

Brocade’s solution design strategies revolve around being open, virtualisation-focused and efficient. Ong attested to Brocade’s open interoperability approach in the market. “We have demonstrated this very well, for all this time. We can support all the storage area networking (SAN) vendors in the market and for a long time, we have been the worldwide leader for SAN, because of the openness of our technology.”

“We are evolving from traditional networking models towards transformational ones. We protect existing IT investment by not wavering our product portfolio from being purpose-built for cloud, and catering to the virtualised space, with Ethernet fabrics and software-defined networking (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV) support.”

For the SAN space, Brocade will continue to focus upon install base migration to Gen 5 technology and pursuing greenfield markets, while for campus networking, after having pioneeredHyperEdge architecture and revamping their portfolio to latest demand, the company is focused on more direct sales engagements with key markets like the public sector.

Uniting the physical and virtual
After being the first to ship its Ethernet fabric portolio, Brocade is poised to permeate the landscape with it. Ong emphatically said, “Every single opportunity in the data centre, we want to get involved in with our Ethernet fabric technology.”

That also means aggressively pursuing migration opportunities in legacy data centre LAN and driving synergies in SDN and NFV markets

With a product portfolio that supports SDN and NFV innovations, Brocade was also first to market with virtual routing via their Vyatta acquisition, they will be targeting strategic opportunities in tier-1 service provider accounts and large data centres.

One possible future scenario
Ong said, “Before the cloud computing trend kicked into high gear, businesses had their own vendor-specific technologies. Some of these were very proprietary.”

In contrast, Ong emphasised that being open is Brocade’s main guiding principle. “It is our core to our strategy.” Participation and commitment to open, industry frameworks like Open Stack and OpenDayLight, addresses the integral orchestration piece of Brocade’s overall solutions.

“Now, with virtualisation, there is blurring of lines between hardware and software. Virtualisation is basically, taking the ‘brain’ out of vendor specific hardware, so that it can be controlled in a more open and flexible and customised manner.”

Ong observed that this opens up a whole new world of opportunities for service providers and enterprises. Interestingly, even players in the processor space, like Intel, has big impact on software networking.

“The number of cores per processor is increasing to now 20 and more. Imagine that you can dedicate each of these cores to each function that you want to compute,” said Ong.

Also, physical networking hardware that can be found in service provider data centres right now, like appliances, route reflectors, CPEs, and so on, could very well be virtualised in the future. All this has huge implications on floor space, efficiency and even energy usage.

Ong conveyed Brocade CTO Ken Cheng’s opinion about the future state of the data centre scene. Organisations’ preoccupation to consolidate their data centres the past decade, could very well take a 180 degree turn, as more efficient, and purpose-built data centres that are smaller in size, are built out closer to customers’ premises.

A ‘smart’ data centre closer to the customer, allows for major optimisation and customisation.