RIYADH – In December 2010, Brocade introduced its VCS Fabric technology, the first true Ethernet fabric solution in the industry, which is highly automated, efficient and purpose-built to support highly virtualized and cloud-optimized data centers and to date, over 1,700 customers have deployed these solutions, with over 550,000 Brocade VDX switch ports shipped. Today the company announced several new innovations and industry-firsts including VCS Virtual Fabric and an extension to its VDX portfolio with the launch of new VCS Fabric-enabled switches. Saudi enterprises that are considering a move to the cloud will benefit greatly from these new product launches. Samer Ismair, MEMA Network Consultant at Brocade, said “recent reports from research firms like Gartner and IDC indicate that traditional data center network architectures do not support cloud and virtualization demands of modern day enterprises and by migrating to an Ethernet fabric in their datacenters, network managers can reduce infrastructure complexity, increase IT flexibility, and improve workload mobility. As cloud environments in Saudi reach mainstream adoption, Brocade's Virtual Fabric that enables native network multitenancy at scale without the need to build an overlay network will be a huge advantage to network operators and CSPs in the Kingdom.” “The new fabric innovations by Brocade which include an easy upgrade path from 1GbE to 10GbE speeds without replacing hardware and scale-out architecture provided by Brocade VDX switches and VCS Fabric technology that improves business agility while reducing operating costs by 50 percent will no doubt be very attractive propositions to Saudi enterprises as they look to re-architect and modernize their network infrastructures.” The new innovations include two multitenant solutions, VCS Virtual Fabric and the VCS Fabric Gateway for VMware NSX, that support Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) and enterprises that offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); an expanded VDX portfolio based on Brocade's next-generation ASIC which now includes Brocade VDX 6740T-1, the industry's first fabric-based 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) top-of-rack switch that can be upgraded to 10 GbE through a software license and a 6 × 100 GbE port module for Brocade VDX 8770 switch, the industry's first and only offering to support 100 GbE Ports on Demand (PoD) capabilities within Ethernet fabrics; and a complete suite of next-generation line cards for the Brocade VDX 8770 chassis switch ranging from 10 GbEBase-T to 100 GbE. Brocade VCS Virtual Fabric offers a highly evolutionary approach to multitenancy that dispenses with the scalability problems inherent with traditional multi-tenant segmentation techniques and ensures that each tenant's traffic remains private while sharing a common infrastructure. It is hypervisor agnostic and provides automated tenant provisioning through open APIs and OpenStack. For customers who prefer overlay architectures, such as VMware NSX, to virtualize their networks, Brocade in collaboration with VMware has developed an integrated and high-performance gateway solution VCS Fabric Gateway for VMware NSX with general availability planned for March 2014. — SG
