Brocade Unveils Its Vision for Data Centers

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. introduced a technology architecture that outlines the company’s vision and the technology investments it will make to help its customers evolve their data centers and IT resources and migrate them to the ‘Virtual Enterprise.’

Brocade intends to deliver on this vision through the Brocade CloudPlex architecture, an open, extensible framework intended to enable customers to build the next generation of distributed and virtualized data centers in an evolutionary way that preserves their ability to dictate all aspects of the migration. Brocade Cloudplex architecture is both the foundation for integrated compute blocks, but it also embraces a customer’s existing multi-vendor infrastructure to unify all of their assets into a single compute and storage domain.

"Virtualization has fundamentally changed the nature of applications by detaching them from their underlying IT infrastructure and introducing a high degree of application mobility across the entire enterprise," said Dave Stevens, chief technology officer at Brocade. "This is the concept of the ‘Virtual Enterprise’ that we feel unleashes the true potential of cloud computing in all its forms – private, hybrid and public."

Through the CloudPlex architecture, Brocade will help its customers scale their IT environments from managing hundreds of virtual machines (VMs) in certain classes of servers to tens of thousands of VMs that are distributed and mobilized across their entire enterprise and throughout the cloud. According to Gartner, the expansion of VMs not only improves automation and reduces operational expenses, it is the primary requirement for IT organizations to migrate to cloud architectures.

Gartner advises that, "IT organizations pursuing virtualization should have an overall strategic plan for cloud computing and a roadmap for the future, and should plan proactively. Further, these organizations must focus on management and process change to manage virtual resources, and to manage the speed that virtualization enables, to avoid virtualization sprawl."

CloudPlex Components
The Brocade Cloudplex architecture will define the stages and the components from Brocade and its partners that are required to get to the Virtual Enterprise. The stages comprise three main categories – fabrics, globalization and open technologies – with some of these components being available today while others are in development or on the roadmap of Brocade’s engineering priorities.

The currently available components are:

• Networks comprised of Ethernet fabrics and Fibre Channel fabrics as the flat, foundation designed to scale to highly virtualized IT environments;
• Multiprotocol fabric adapters for simplified server I/O consolidation;
• High-performance application delivery products necessary for load balancing network traffic across distributed data centers.

The components on the roadmap are:

• Integrated and validated solution bundles of server, virtualization, networking and storage resources called Brocade Virtual Compute Blocks. An integral element of the Brocade CloudPlex architecture, Brocade will enable its systems partners and integrators to deliver Virtual Compute Block solutions comprising servers, hypervisors, storage, and cloud-optimized networking in pre-bundled, pre-racked configurations with unified support;
• Universal fabric and network extension delivered through a new platform capable of supporting a number of IP, SAN and mainframe extension technologies including virtual private LAN services (VPLS), Fibre Channel over IP (FCIP) and FICON;
• An advancement of Brocade Fabric ID technology called Cloud IDs that enables secure isolation and mobility of VMs for native multi-tenancy cloud environments;
• An open framework for management, provisioning and integration designed to promote multi-vendor and system-to-sytem interoperability specifically for cloud environments. These include Brocade products supporting OpenStack software for storage, compute and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) capabilities enabled through OpenFlow;
• Unified education, support and services delivered through Brocade and partners to help customers manage this highly distributed ‘Virtual Enterprise’ environment.

"We are excited to be working with Brocade to develop highly-scalable virtualized computing and storage configurations, providing superior cost-performance solutions today for our customers while at the same time establishing a clear path to cloud IT architectures in the future. Specifically, Brocade switches coupled with Dell PowerEdge servers and EqualLogic or Dell Compellent storage provide the scalability, flexibility and efficiency our customers demand in the virtual era," said Dario Zamarian, Vice President and General Manager, Dell Networking.

"Fujitsu’s global cloud strategy is built on our real experience in working with customers on the delivery of both Services and Infrastructures for Cloud computing across the world. We believe that common processes, holistic management of infrastructure elements and the use of industry standards are fundamentally helping customers to ease the transition and to migrate their largest and most complex IT environments smoothly to join ‘any mode’ of the cloud consumption of their choosing. Brocade shares these views and has laid out a compelling vision through its CloudPlex architecture that Fujitsu Technology Solutions fully endorses and will support. This architecture provides compelling added value to Fujitsu’s Cloud offerings by defined standards and holistic management," said Jens-Peter Seick, Senior Vice President, Data Center Systems, Fujitsu.

"Hitachi is helping customers deliver IT services through the cloud by using open, standards-based technologies that let them build and scale their virtualized data centers at their own pace. With Brocade’s CloudPlex architecture, both Hitachi and Brocade address our mutual customers’ IT needs and protect their existing IT investments by migrating their legacy devices to cloud deployments – preventing cloud from becoming just another IT silo," said Sean Moser, Vice President, Storage Software Product Management, Hitachi Data Systems.

"Recent advancements in cloud and virtualization are making it possible for enterprises to deploy an intelligent infrastructure that enables workloads to move around the enterprise and around the world in a transparent, fluid way. We believe that enabling flexible application deployment is imperative to mainstream adoption of cloud computing. VMware and Brocade share a common vision of offering customers the ability to accelerate IT by reducing complexity while significantly lowering costs and enabling more flexible, agile services delivery," said Parag Patel, Vice President, Global Strategic Alliances, VMware.