By Cat Yong
Brocade is expanding its longstanding OEM relationship with storage player, EMC, by adding Brocade VCS Ethernet fabrics, to EMC’s Connectrix family of network switches. This makes it the industry’s first network switch designed for IP storage.
The reason is simple.
As more and more IT environments become highly virtualised, there is a need to move towards Ethernet-type of cloud-based infrastructure, to support changing user behaviour and increasing east-west traffic in the data centre.
“Legacy IP networks designs were never intended for today’s new IP applications, such as cloud, mobile, social and big data,“ said Brocade Malaysia country manager, Sean Ong.
VDX switches
He also added that Brocade has deployed its own version of IP storage switches, branded as VCS Ethernet fabric for the last 3 years.
“This is our VDX range of virtual cluster Ethernet technology. But, it is important to now extend this via our OEM partnership with EMC, and EMC choosing Brocade, is a huge testimonial for us.”
Ong also admitted that Brocade’s VDX range used to be niche, but now not so with the EMC deal. “It is a world vision now.”
Why VDX switches?
The massive explosion of data coming onto shared networks, poses a huge challenge for IP storage workloads. Storage has traditionally been built for enterprises and their customers, and require enterprise-grade features like resiliency and security.
“But these enterprise-level SAN or storage area networks were not friendly to cloud-based or virtualised environments,” Ong pointed out.
With new workloads like increasing network access from outside corporate firewalls, IP surveillance cameras, voice over IP and so on, performance becomes difficult to guarantee.
This necessitates a layer, if you can call it that, for SAN and network-attached storage or NAS which can connect to the network and access it directly with convenience.
“There are no SLA guarantees on a shared network. When applications don’t perform, who is accountable?” Ong pointed out.
Co-existence
Ong views traditional San architecture is still being relevant however. “Traditional SAN works fine, but there are segments of the traffic which would require different types of flexibility for on-demand services.
“Thirty-percent of workloads tend to be still mission-critical services that need support from traditional architecture. This (IP storage switch) is never meant to disrupt SAN, but to give it more flexibility,” Ong emphasised.
Among some of the benefits that this IP storage switch is supposed to provide, is flexibility as well as operational efficiency of cloud infrastructure and services being offered today.
