Brocade Updates VCS Fabric Networking Technology

Brocade (BRCD) has made improvements to its VCS Fabric infrastructure technology, adding features aimed at cloud and data center service providers and large enterprises.

“We’ve made a slew of innovations in the data center space,” said Martin McNealis, senior director, Data Center, at Brocade. “This is really the culmination of a strategy we put in place over the last couple of years to double-down on the data center and IP space.”

Of note is Brocade’s new multitenancy architecture, which gives cloud services providers or large enterprises the ability to logically partition the network to accommodate a wide range of customers. “The inherent ability for a company to scale depends on how well they are able to leverage the infrastructure and support more customers,” McNealis said. “The VCS Fabric for the data center now does that.”

Also of note is the VCS Virtual Fabric, which was announced recently at VMworld 2013. “The mulitenancy architecture encompasses a few areas, including integration with VMware,” he noted. “With a virtual topology in the network customers have the choice to use Brocade if they’re in a VMware environment.”

Brocade also announced VCS AutoQoS, which automatically recognizes and prioritizes storage traffic on the network. “With our position in the market, we understand storage and the data center, and now we have a compelling networking element as well. AutoQoS is a way to optimize and transport storage-based traffic cost-effectively,” McNealis said.

Finally, Brocade has added to its core switching platforms for the data center with the release of two new top of rack switches, the Brocade VDX 6740 and VDX 6740-T. Both include VCS Virtual Fabric support, and their 40GbE to 160GbE trunks offer the industry’s highest uplink capacity in a leaf switch, according to the company. In addition, the switches feature 32 Flex Ports, which can be used for Fibre Channel, Ethernet or Fiber Channel over Ethernet, which the company noted offers customers another level of investment protection.

The technologies, which are available now, help position Brocade as a leader in the fabric networking space, McNealis said.

“We’ve been kings in the storage and SAN space and have been leveraging that technology to move into the IP side, and I think now we have some differentiated solutions in the market,” McNealis said. “It’s time to step it up.
“The market momentum is there,” he added. “We are betting on the hybrid cloud model and the technology we’ve got is right in the sweet spot.”