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By Cat Yong Brocade’s vision for the on-demand data centre which began with Ethernet fabric solution innovation, has turned another significant chapter.
Sean Ong, Country Manager of Brocade Malaysia said, “Now Ethernet fabric can be seen as the next-generation building block for data centres for cloud solutions.” Brocade can also lay claim to having the industry’s largest Ethernet fabric install base – more than 1,400 customers worldwide and 400,000 VDX switch ports shipped to date. Ong shared, “In May, we did a spring launch of the on-demand data centre (solutions). Now, we are talking about the on-demand data centre at scale.” This involves the launch of enhanced Brocade Ethernet fabric solutions; VCS Fabric Technology and Brocade next generation VDX platforms, which mean new VCS fabric capabilities like native multi-tenancy, storage-aware networking and 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) performance. There is also a solution focus on network function virtualisation (NFV) or the new Brocade Vyatta 5600 vRouter (virtual router). The new Ethernet Fabric solutions are also wrapped by a multi-tenancy blueprint, which Brocade unveiled as the industry’s most complete, end-to-end for delivering scalable data centre multi-tenancy, from the server to the WAN. Ong had shared, “This is a multi-tenancy story for service providers.” According to him, Brocade is empowering on-demand data centres by interconnecting resources within and between data centres, using the world’s most automated, efficient and agile fabric-based networks. “This is a requirement for cloud-based data centres,” Ong emphasised. Overcoming lag He also opined about a current industry trend. “Demand for hybrid cloud is intense from large enterprises. For the past 5 to ten years, time-to-market has been taking too long, as internal IT is not responsive enough to business demands like setting up marketing campaigns and so on. “The business is challenging IT to deliver solutions faster and in a more cost –effective manner. At times, enterprises find they need to leverage what is provided by external parties, and public cloud is becoming popular (because of this).” With that in mind, public clouds’ ability to offer multi-tenancy features becomes all the more crucial. A multi-tenant network for service providers and, even enterprises should be able to offer tenant isolation over shared infrastructure, tenant security, be able to scale to support thousands of tenants and have services offered on a per tenant basis. Brocade’s VCS virtual fabric claims to be able to allocate a logical fabric for each tenant within a shared physical fabric, which can tick the boxes beside each of the capabilities above and give enterprises secure isolation and peace-of-mind. Virtual routers With virtualisation, one hardware (server) could be hosting many applications at the same time. With servers packing in more processing power as time goes by, it drives servers to also pack in more virtual machines (VMs). Servers in actual fact, are also becoming more network-centric as huge leaps in traffic throughput is driving shift towards 10G network interface cards (NICs), according to Ong. “The standard number of VMs found in servers could be 25 to 30, with the maximum extreme, being 70 to 90, now. This could potentially increase to 150 VMs. “These network-centric servers, therefore need faster virtual servers to be able to handle all the traffic traversing inter-servers, intra-servers, and increased VM density as well. The new Brocade Vyatta 5600 which is scheduled for general availability at end 2013, complements the Brocade Vyatta 5400 product family, with a new vPlane Architecture that is capable of 10Gbps throughput per x86 core. Brocade terms the Vyatta 5600 virtual router as a game changer that aggressively leverages the increasing power of x86 Intel processors. The FSI application Ong cited one vertical which could immediately benefit from Brocade’s new solutions. “It is a regulatory requirement for the financial services industry (FSI) to have a disaster recovery centre (DRC),” he said, adding that because of infrastructure inefficiencies, IT siloes, rigid architectures, operational inefficiencies and inability to scale, these DR sites are usually passive sites that receive traffic to be backed up from an active production data centre. He proposes for the DR site to be active as well, like a cloud-based data centre, using Ethernet Fabric as a crucial building-block for the next-generation data centre.
