Following its acquisition of Foundry Networks in 2008, Brocade is
now bringing together high-end Ethernet technology and the best of
Fibre Channel innovation. In November 2010 it announced what it
claims is the industry’s first Ethernet fabric switching
solutions that are purpose-built for highly virtualized and
cloud-optimized data centers. VCS, the underlying technology in its
new VDX 6720 data center switches, eliminates many of the issues
that network admins faced with Spanning Tree Protocol, and frees up
bandwidth.
Ashis Guha, Head of Strategic Accounts & OEM’s, India and
SAARC, Brocade told
InformationWeek that CIOs faced
challenges with Ethernet when moving into cloud and virtualization
environments.
“We are collapsing the network— there are multiple
layers of networks in the data center and we’ve collapsed
that to improve the bandwidth. With the Ethernet fabric we are
collapsing that so you get more bandwidth utilization,
as much as 80 – 90 percent,” said Guha. “The
bottleneck was the Spanning Tree Protocol because of which more
layers of networks were required. And now we’ve eliminated
this.”
An Ethernet fabric eliminates the redundant switches at each
layer and the requirement for spanning tree, by running switches in
an active/active mode that uses equal cost and multi-pathing
— so that any topology can be run. The Ethernet fabrics are
created with Brocade VDX 6720 data center switches, a new family of
10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) offerings. The switches eliminate the
need for Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), collapsing the access and
aggregation networking layers to create a flat, multipath,
deterministic network that is ideal for virtualized
environments.
"We are collapsing the network— there are multiple
layers of networks in the data center and we’ve collapsed
that to improve the bandwidth"
- Ashis Guha, Head of Strategic Accounts & OEM’s, India
and SAARC, Brocade
The advantage is organizations can develop flat and fast network
topologies with multiple links between switches that are active at
all times. “We’ve bought all the benefits of fibre
channel to the Ethernet. With the technology that we are
introducing…. you can connect fibre channel, iSCSI, FCoE,
NFS, CIFS, and traditional IP. So predominantly we are enabling the
cloud infrastructure. We are simplifying the network implementation
of the cloud,” said Guha. Over half of all IT workloads will
run on virtual machines by the end of 2010, with that number
climbing beyond 70 percent by the end of 2013.
VCS TECHNOLOGY
The Brocade VDX
6720 switches are also the first products that incorporate VCS
(Virtual Cluster Switching) technology that was announced in June
2010. This technology transforms data center networks through
certain innovations that
are optimized for highly virtualized and cloud environments.
Explaining the benefits of Brocade VCS technology, Guha said it is
no longer necessary to configure switches that are added to the
network. “The cluster would be seen as a logical chassis and
all the switches under that are aware of each other and have all
the intelligence of the other switch,” said Guha.
VCS provides a fully distributed control pane and that’s how
the other switches become aware of each other as well as the entire
network topology. The VM network characteristics and configuration
automatically migrate with the VM by using Automatic Migration of
Port Profiles (AMPP) technology. VCS also simplifies configuration
management by treating the cluster as a single logical switch.
“This management approach significantly reduces the number of
elements being managed in the fabric to reduce operating cost and
complexity,” informed Guha.
About Author
Brian Pereira is a veteran IT journalist based in Mumbai, India. He is currently the Editor at InformationWeek India. Brian has written several articles on consumer and enterprise technology, since 1992. He has also spoken at Forums such as Nasscom, Cloud Computing World Forum and many others. During his career he worked for reputed organizations like Times of India, Indian Express Group, Jasubhai Digital Media and Infomedia18.
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