Brocade has announced a its new switching platform, the Brocade VDX 8770 Switch, along with VCS Fabric technology enhancements in the hope of taking data centre network simplicity, efficiency and resiliency to a new scale.
The Brocade VDX 8770 is designed for enterprises and service providers hoping to both simplify and scale-out their data centre infrastructure in order to accelerate new service introduction and drive innovation, while also lowering costs, the company stated.
With more than 700 customers who have already installed Brocade VDX switches, Brocade hopes to continue to build on the success of its VCS fabric-enabled switch portfolio with the addition of the modular Brocade VDX 8770 Switch.
“Ethernet Fabrics are the key technology component of fabric-based infrastructures. As organisations seek to maximise efficiencies in the data centre, enable greater agility, and optimise the user experience, they are moving to more scalable, flatter network topologies to drive higher performance and lower latency across the entire network, said Mark Fabbi, Vice President, distinguished analyst, Gartner.
The Brocade VDX 8770 and VCS Fabric technology deliver a radically simplified data centre network. Designed specifically for highly virtualised environments, Ethernet fabrics built on VCS Fabric technology accelerate application deployment and enable faster virtual machine (VM) migrations through zero -touch VM discovery, VM mobility and VM port configuration migration. Using VCS fabrics, customers can manage dozens of switches as a single logical device, dramatically reducing operational costs. They can also save installation time as new switches self-provision when they are connected to the fabric.
“For Service Providers, fabrics create a more flexible architecture that allows a broad range of services to be delivered to a large customer set with diverse requirements. For enterprises, fabric architectures simplify network operations and support virtualisation by breaking the physical ties between application servers and the network topology,” Fabbi added.
With today’s virtualised and cloud-centric data centre architectures, application performance is highly dependent on the efficiency and utilisation of the network infrastructure. VM density per server is also rapidly increasing as customers seek to maximise server utilisation. To support these requirements, they need a high-performance network that can scale out on demand to address immediate business needs.
“The Brocade VDX 8770, VCS enabled switches, with full bandwidth fabric and multipath capabilities, provide our customers with significant availability, efficiency and scalability benefits.” Sujal Patel, president, Isilon Storage Division, EMC.
The Brocade VDX 8770 aims to provide unprecedented fabric scalability for the world’s largest data centre environments, enabling customers to expand a single VCS fabric up to 8000 switch ports with up to 384,000 VMs attached to the fabric—20 times the scalability of the leading competitor.
“I see Ethernet fabrics as the biggest innovation in the service provider market. We’ve been using Brocade VCS Fabric technology for two years now and we believe that it is the best fabric solution available. The tremendous throughput, flexibility, and stability of Brocade VCS fabrics have allowed us to expand our services greatly, while exceeding customer expectations,” said Stefan Ideler, CTO, Interactive 3D.
