New Brocade Data Centre Offerings

By Charles F Moreira

Brocade announced several new data centre networking software and hardware products, solutions and enhancements to Malaysia as part of its spring offerings worldwide.

They include :-

-The Brocade Vyatta vRouter virtual router and Brocade Virtual ADX application delivery switch.
-Physical networking solutions – namely Brocade MLXe 4×40 GbE core router module, -Brocade NetIron carrier Ethernet switch and carrier Ethernet routers and a Brocade NetIron OS update.
-Orchestration and management solutions – namely, the Brocade OpenStack solution and Brocade Application Resource Broker.

According to Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst with ZK Research, whilst one of the benefits of virtualisation is reduced capital expenses, recent evidence shows that lack of proper orchestration, automation and management tools, operational expenses of highly virtualised actually increases.

Also introduced is the new Release 6.6 of the Brocade Vyatta vRouter. “It supports virtual routing between virtual machines, as well as a virtual firewall, within each virtual private network (VPN),” said Brocade Malaysia, Country Manager, Sean Ong.

Sean Ong

It includes support for multicast routing and dynamic multipoint VPN, both of which are critical for large enterprises and cloud service providers. It’s hypervisor agnostic and lets users create multitier virtual networks that can be deployed, configured or changed on demand and significantly reduce CAPEX and OPEX. It’s already being used in virtual private data centres to public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, and supports all major hypervisors, including VMware, Microsoft, Citrix and Red Hat.

Also new is the Brocade Virtual ADX virtual application delivery platform. It’s benefits include :-

-Fast application delivery service provisioning
-Control of application management and provisioning via the SOAP/XML API.
-Integrates with third-party or home-grown orchestration and automation tools.
-Simplified orchestration of the application delivery network tier.
-Enables validation, testing and replication of production or quality assurance environments on demand.
-Reduced network infrastructure CAPEX and OPEX.

Also introduced was an update to the Brocade Application Resource Broker, which enhances its dynamic resource provisioning capability to enable hybrid cloud services, as well as business continuity across globally distributed data centres for disaster avoidance. Brocade will also continue work on the OpenStack plug-in for load balancing as a service.

For data centre network infrastructure, Brocade introduced new 40 GbE (Gigabit Ethernet) interfaces for its Brocade MLXe Core Router, higher -performance modules for the Brocade NetIron CER (Carrier Ethernet) routers and a new release of NetIron OS.

The four-port 40 GbE Brocade MLXe module supports the kinds of mission-critical and data-intensive services required in data centre and enterprise core networks, and seamlessly integrates with the Brocade VCS Fabric technology for an end-to-end multi-tenant solution in large data centres.

For smaller data centres with Carrier Ethernet connections, the new versions of its NetIron CER routers have up to four 10 GbE ports to economically extend the reach of Carrier Ethernet and enable rapid deployment of new services at the network edge. To complement them, new Brocade NetIron CES switches were also announced.

The new NetIron software release enhances high-performance routing and SDN (software-defined network) capabilities. It supports OpenFlow Hybrid Port Mode technology, to help customers simultaneously deploy OpenFlow and traditional routing on the same port for a seamless migration path to SDN, and lets customers optimise specific data flows without disrupting the existing production traffic. It also supports multi-tenant data centres for improved cloud service delivery and more stringent service level agreements.

New plug-in
Brocade also introduced a new plug-in for its VDX switch family. A component of the OpenStack Grizzly release, it lets customers build and scale-out data centre infrastructures based on its VCS Fabric technology and enables on-demand fabric provisioning OpenStack-based clouds. Available now, the plug-in is currently undergoing certification for the Rackspace Private Cloud.

Meanwhile, Brocade announced that it now has over 1,100 VCS Fabric customers worldwide, with 250,000 ports shipped. The Ethernet fabric switching solutions are purpose-built for highly virtualised and cloud-optimised data centres. Brocade claims it’s an industry-first when it was launched two years ago.

Gartner believes that automation has had a major impact on data centre operations and that the network will become part of a more coordinated virtual architecture, while according to IDC, enterprises wanting to optimise their investments made in virtualisation and cloud technologies should consider migrating to an Ethernet fabric, which lets data centre network managers reduce infrastructure complexity, increase IT flexibility, and improve workload mobility in private clouds.