Brocade ups Ethernet fabric push

Change is good. That's the message from Graham Schultz, Brocade regional director ANZ, who says whenever there's a change in infrastructure, it's good news for the reseller market.

The company recently launched a new ethernet fabric switch and 24-port 10 Gigabit Ethernet module for its MLXe Series routers as it bulks up its ethernet fabric and software defined network strategy to meet what it expects to be an inevitable movement to software defined networks.

Brocade says with today's virtualised and cloud-centric data center architectures, application performance is highly dependent on the efficiency and utilisation of the network infrastructure. VM density per server is also rapidly increasing and a high-performance network is needed which can scale out on demand.

The VDX 8770 switch allows customers to expand a single VCS Fabric up to 8000 switch ports with up to 384,000 VMs attached to the fabric, and features a 4Tbps backplane.

Schultz says the main deployments are likely to be around content and service providers and large data centers catering to big data 'but we already have interest in New Zealand'.

"There is a change taking place in the data center with the shift from three-tier to the flatter, two-tier Ethernet. It's an evolution and transformation that is taking place today but not all customers understand it yet," Schultz says. He says that provides opportunity for partners to 'go out there and help customers understand how and why they need to be looking at this and how it can complement the business benefit they can derive from virtualisation.

"We have more than 700 customers running on Ethernet fabric architecture. Moving forward, this is going to be the way to deploy network infrastructure for highly vitualised data centers," Schultz says.

"Because there is such a proliferation of virtualisation taking place in the market, there is a definite requirement to relook at infrastructure.