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Brocade VDX Switches Deployed by China’s Leading Online Travel Agency

SHANGHAI, China; August 12, 2013 – China’s leading online travel agency has successfully virtualized its data center operations following the deployment of an Ethernet fabric powered by the Brocade® (NASDAQ: BRCD) VDX® switch family. Ctrip.com International Ltd (NASDAQ: CTRP), which operates the Ctrip.com Web site and call center as well as conventional travel agency branches in 16 cities across China, is now running approximately 500 virtual machines (VMs) on 200 host servers at its Shanghai data center along with additional VMs running at its testing and development center in Nantong.

Ctrip’s virtualization project kicked off in August 2012 with the deployment of its first set of Brocade VDX 6720 Switches, enabling the company to build a small Ethernet fabric within its data center and start migrating the first of its servers to its virtual platform. Ctrip is running a multiple-hypervisor environment, using VMware’s vSphere and Citrix’s XenServer. Brocade VCS® Fabric technology, which runs on the Brocade VDX switches, supports multiple types of hypervisors, and the Brocade Automatic Migration of Port Profiles (AMPP) feature enables Ctrip’s seamless migration in the future.

“The plan from the outset was to make our data center virtualized in order to increase agility while managing cost, and that meant taking no half measures,” said Jason Shi, General Manager of Site Operations Center at Ctrip.com. “Our existing data center switching infrastructure was based on a conventional three-layer architecture that was simply not designed to support line-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet and ultra-low latency virtualization. Brocade VCS Fabric technology, on the other hand, is VM-aware and delivers low-latency performance between ports, which is critical because much of the traffic flow in a cloud data center is between servers.”

Brocade VDX 6720 switches provide wire-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports in a fixed-configuration device that is the modular foundation for a single-layer data center Ethernet fabric. As was the case with Ctrip.com, organizations can start out with a small deployment and add new switches to expand the size of their data center fabrics on a pay-as-you-grow basis. The intelligence of VCS Fabric technology means expansion is a plug-and-play process with each new Brocade VDX switch becoming instantly aware of the network topology and the location of the VMs.

With 10 GbE connectivity to the Ethernet fabric, the hypervisor host systems have ample bandwidth to service multiple VMs that would otherwise saturate a 1 GbE connection. Port-to-port latency of 600 nanoseconds and efficient load-balanced multipathing across the fabric help deliver the performance Ctrip.com needs to provide an excellent online experience for its customers.

“Our Ethernet fabric solution has been gaining strong market traction in Asia over the last years, reflecting the increasing maturity of data center virtualization initiatives,” said Sam Lo, Senior Director for Greater China at Brocade. “Ctrip.com is an excellent example of what a company can achieve with the right focus and technology. By addressing the challenges of cloud computing head on, it has realized its virtualization goals and benefits in a remarkably short timeframe.”

Brocade VCS fabrics are self-forming and self-healing, providing a highly resilient, scalable foundation for very large or dynamic cloud deployments. Multinode fabrics can be managed as a single logical element, and fabrics can be deployed and easily redeployed in a variety of configurations optimized to the needs of particular workloads.