Brocade simplifies migration of services to the cloud

Brocade has launched a unifying network architecture system called 'Brocade One' - a set of products the vendor claims will remove the technical barriers to migrating services and data between clouds.

The firm said that these products will enable organisations to evolve existing networks to create highly virtualised on-demand platforms based on simpler network architectures.

The company used its Tech Day event in New York to unveil a series of fabric-based innovations designed to simplify network architectures.

These included Virtual Cluster Switching technology - designed to overcome the limitations of conventional Ethernet networking by applying non-stop operations and offering any-to-any connectivity for those organisations building "clouds".

Using VCS, adopters of Brocade's latest generation of switches will be able to manage multiple switches (up to 1,000 gigabit ethernet ports and 10,000 virtual machines) in a single domain (as a single logical switch).

VCS was announced as a native function of three new Brocade switches - a 60-port 10 Gigabit switch, a 48-port 1 Gigabit switch and a 24-port 10 Gigabit switch, which will be available in Australia by October.

"As you add switch ports into your cloud, they automatically take on the personality and policies of that cloud," said Phillip Coates, senior systems engineer at Brocade Australia. "It enables policy-driven migration of applications."

The security and Quality of Service settings, for example, can be adjusted automatically when a VM moves between switches on different subnets.

Coates explained that VCS solves the problem of VM migration that gets "broken" when virtual machines within one Layer 2 cloud are migrated to another. It also "eliminates the need for spanning tree protocol", providing the characteristics of fibre channel's routing protocol across the converged network to provide "access to all the bandwidth within a cloud."

He said the technology, as described, creates a "virtual cluster of switching infrastructure",

Brocade's Virtual Access Layer, meanwhile, provides a "hook" or view of Brocade's networking smarts from within the the management consoles of virtualisation management programs built by the likes of VMware and Microsoft.

Brocade explained that it had designed the Virtual Access Layer to be vendor-agnostic in order to support all major hypervisors, and to use industry standards including Virtual Ethernet Port Aggregator and Virtual Ethernet Bridging.

The firm also announced multi-protocol support for converged fabrics to enable the transportation of all types of network and storage traffic over a single wire to reduce complexity and provide a simplified migration path from current technologies.

Lastly, Brocade said that the new offerings are built around network standards to ensure full interoperability with its existing 8000 Fibre Channel over Ethernet Switch and Converged Network Adapters.

"Australia is a very early adopter of new technologies," said Graham Schultz, country manager for Brocade Australia. "There has been a lot of deployments of virtual infrastructure - I believe in fact that Australia boasts the biggest uptake of VMware per capita in the world. These solutions are more than appropriate for the local market."

Brett Winterford contributed to this story.