Brocade and Hyve Solutions Partner

Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. and Hyve Solutions, a division of SYNNEX Corporation in purpose-built, data center server and storage solutions, announced a definitive agreement to build a family of integrated, pre-tested data center solutions to deliver scale, performance and automation for the big data market.

Hyve Solutions is building the integrated solutions based on its server platform and Brocade VCS Fabric technology, along with offerings from an ecosystem of mutual partners. The first two integrated solutions in this family were demonstrated at Brocade’s booth at Supercomputing 2012 in Salt Lake City, UT, in addition to the IBM booth and WARP Mechanics booth.

Big data applications require a high-performance, fabric-based network infrastructure tightly integrated with purpose-built, high-density, flexible and efficient server and storage solutions. The Brocade VDX 8770 Switch with VCS Fabric technology provides the low-latency, high-performance cut-through architecture to address the bursty and variable traffic patterns inherent in big data applications. The result is a flexible VCS fabric that is designed for scalability and performance. As network needs grow, capacity can be added without manual configuration as new switches self-provision when connected to the fabric. Network capacity can be added five times faster than with competitive offerings. VCS fabrics also provide network efficiency and resiliency with load-balanced, multipathing innovations at layers 1 through 3 of the network, enhancing big data application performance while maximizing available network bandwidth.

Coupled with Hyve Solutions server and storage offerings, this networking infrastructure creates a custom, turnkey, integrated, network, server and storage solution designed for big data environments that require innovative server and storage designs. Hyve Solutions’ server and storage solutions integrate density, efficiency, flexibility, quality and cost-effective designs, elements that are critical for a big data platform.

As part of the agreement announced, Brocade and Hyve Solutions will qualify, test and deliver a family of integrated, pre-tested solutions for the big data market, including:

• The Hyve Solutions bigD series2 and series8 are built on servers from Hyve Solutions in addition to VDX switches, ICX 6610 switches, and the Brocade 1860 Fabric Adapter. Targeting customers that use the Apache Hadoop open-source software framework, the bigD series2 and series8 solutions also integrate hardware and software from IBM (BigInsights Hadoop), Zettaset and Fusion I/O to deliver performance and reliability for Hadoop environments.

A Scale Out File System product, based on the open-source Lustre file system, targets the HPC storage infrastructure market space and leverages the WARP Mechanics PetaPod Appliance, Hyve Solutions servers, VDX 8770 switches, ICX 6610 switches and the 1860 Fabric Adapter.

"This agreement with Hyve Solutions is a significant milestone for Brocade," said Jason Nolet, VP, Data Center Networking Group, Brocade. "Working hand-in-hand with Hyve Solutions, an industry leader in purpose-built data center server and storage solutions, Brocade can help deliver best-in-class big data solutions built on Brocade VCS fabrics and backed by a robust network of hardware and software partners."

"Hyve Solutions is pleased to partner with Brocade to provide customers with powerful and innovative solutions for their big data challenges," said Steve Ichinaga, SVP and GM, Hyve Solutions. "Brocade’s expertise, innovation and industry-leading Ethernet switches provide the high-performance networking foundation Hyve Solutions requires to deliver these big data solutions."

Customers benefit from Hyve Solutions technical expertise, integration and testing, and its network of partnerships with hardware vendors such as Brocade. In addition, Hyve Solutions will be integrating Brocade technical support into its own support services by leveraging the Brocade SI Cooperative Support Program, which allows partners access to a complete Brocade knowledge base and expertise.

These big data solutions are available.

"Big data use cases have the power to radically transform how organizations use information. IT needs to understand that big data is not simply big volume, and that big data projects may fail if they don’t pay attention to variety, velocity and complexity, as well as volume. IT should expect significant infrastructure re-engineering and budget changes as priorities shift to big data processing and analysis." (Big Data Challenges for the IT Infrastructure Team, Sheila Childs, Merv Adrian, Gartner, Feb. 10, 2012)

"Fusion-io is proud to work with innovative companies like Hyve Solutions and Brocade to deliver open, turnkey solutions architected to meet the big data needs of the modern enterprise," said Will Hall, Fusion-io, Inc.‘s VP, Worldwide OEM Sales. "We believe that flexible and scalable open big data platforms like these will allow companies to efficiently turn data into actionable insights."

"By providing multi-vendor turn key solutions we can help delight our customers by providing quicker time to value. IBM, Hyve Solutions and Brocade have crafted a solution that will help drive the true benefits of big data into the marketplace," said Bruce Weed, Program Director, IBM Corp.‘s Big Data.

"This appliance represents a major step forward," said Josh Judd, CTO of WARP Mechanics Ltd. "Not just for our engineering team, but for the storage industry. This is the first time an Ethernet storage solution has delivered performance and capacity at anything close to this level. I look forward to seeing the WARP/Brocade/Hyve partnership yield many more industry-leading solutions over the next few quarters."

"We are excited that Zettaset and our Orchestrator software is an enabler within the Brocade and SYNNEX/Hyve Solutions ecosystem of partners," said Jim Vogt, CEO, Zettaset, Inc. "Zettaset conducted a thorough technical evaluation of this combined big data solution in a Hadoop cluster environment as part of our interoperability testing process. Industry-standard benchmarking confirmed the robustness of the solution and yielded outstanding cluster performance levels that were well beyond our expectations."