Aiming high

At the Brocade Technology Day in New York, the company took the wraps off its blueprint for stitching together storage and network elements to deliver application performance and information integrity.

“We are bridging together the two disparate worlds of storage and networking to deliver a simplified, converged, and non-stop architecture,” says John McHugh, Brocade’s Chief Marketing Officer, who kicked off the event.

“We are moving to a world where apps and information are getting increasingly distributed on the cloud, accessed by mobile workforce. At the same time, computing and storage are moving out of data centre into the network and end nodes. The network is the data centre now,” added McHugh.

At the heart of Brocade One is Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS), which aims to simplify, automate and scale the data centre for highly virtualized environments. “Data centre is in a state of rapid transition. We seeing continued distribution of computing and storage resources outside the data centre than inside. Now, cloud computing has a profound impact on data centre design. VCS is the first true data centre Ethernet fabric, which will revolutionise layer 2 and fundamentally change the way we build access and aggregation layers,” said Dave Stevens, Brocade’s CTO.

Brocade said VCS will offer a fully distributed control plane and network-wide knowledge of all members, devices and virtual machines. VCS cluster can be logically managed as a single Ethernet switch with auto-configuration capabilities and centralized or distributed management.

Brocade will roll out VCS enabled fixed switches during this calendar year and through 2011. In addition, the company has also announced a new family of ASICs, a new management platform and new generation of CNS, to be rolled during the end of this year and early next year.