Brocade Unveils Additions to Switch Portfolio 

Brocade announced today the availability of its multitenant solutions, including VCS Virtual Fabric, and new additions to the Brocade VDX switch portfolio, broadening its suite of cloud-optimized, fabric-enabled switches.

According to Gartner, "Traditional data center physical networks deploy primarily 'access, aggregation, core' architecture, with Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) for topology management and device base provisioning and operation model. Such architecture and model will not meet the demands of modern data centers."

Brocade recognized this more than three years ago, and set out to transform networking by delivering a highly automated, efficient, VM-aware Ethernet fabric architecture that provides the ideal network foundation for virtualized, cloud-based data centers. The innovations being announced today extend this vision with enhanced capabilities that address new data center imperatives, such as network virtualization, and evolving network requirements in Cloud Service Provider (CSP) and enterprise data centers.

An emerging requirement for both CSPs and enterprises that offer Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) is the ability to provide multitenancy support at scale to ensure each tenant's traffic remains private while sharing a common infrastructure. To address this requirement, Brocade has developed two multitenant solutions: VCS Virtual Fabric and the VCS Fabric Gateway for VMware NSX.

Brocade also expanded its flagship VDX portfolio with new VCS Fabric-enabled switches based on Brocade's next-generation ASIC. The new products include the industry's first fabric-based 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) top-of-rack switch that can be upgraded to 10 GbE through a software license, offering customers unmatched investment protection. In addition, Brocade announced a complete suite of next-generation line cards for the Brocade VDX 8770 chassis switch ranging from 10 GbEBase-T to 100 GbE.