Time to Say Goodbye: Research Indicates that Businesses Need Agile Networks to Meet Evolving User Demands

Less than one-in-ten enterprises has faith in its existing network; more agile infrastructures are needed to deliver next-generation applications and services

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -  May 29, 2014: – New research* commissioned by Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) indicates that enterprises are being restricted by legacy network resources, requiring them to say “goodbye” to yesterday’s infrastructure and challenge the status quo on how to architect their data centers for the future. While many enterprises (75 percent) have invested in the network over the last three years, a staggering 92 percent of senior IT Decision-Makers (ITDMs) feel that their infrastructure is not agile enough to deliver robust and scalable services to stakeholders or support next-generation applications.

To further highlight the challenge facing these organizations, more than a quarter of respondents admitted to having to take remedial action on network outages several times a week, if not daily, while almost a fifth of respondents candidly stated that their network was not fit for purpose, suggesting that the legacy network is in need of change.

“The fact that legacy networks are not able to meet the evolving demands of modern business is not necessarily news, but what is concerning is the scale of the problem,” stated Jason Nolet, Vice President Data Center Switching and Routing at Brocade. “Over the last ten years, the way we interact with data has evolved beyond anyone’s expectation. Billions of connected devices are overloading global networks with requests every second, and users demand always-on, instantaneous access to applications and services. Virtualization and cloud models are scaling at pace but require greater network agility and performance, as well as reduced operational cost and complexity. All of these factors are placing pressure on an infrastructure that, frankly, was never designed to deal with such demands. While the problem itself is not new, the scale to which it is impacting businesses means that enterprises must address it immediately or face the real danger of becoming obsolete to their customers.”

Many enterprises are beginning to meet this challenge head-on. Acknowledging that their current networks cannot scale to meet short- to mid-term business needs, more than half of senior ITDMs are either actively evaluating Software-Defined Networking (SDN) technologies or plan to do so in the next 12 months. Users believe that a software-based approach will deliver improved uptime and availability, better access to real-time information and increased productivity, so they are looking to re-engineer their environments to help them on the journey to SDN. As such, 65 percent of respondents are actively using (or evaluating in the next year) Ethernet fabric architectures in a bid to manage their current cost, complexity and reliability challenges while building the robust physical infrastructure needed for SDN.

“The findings clearly show that, despite apparent investment in the past few years, most organizations are still ill-equipped for current business demands and need to say “goodbye” to their legacy environments. The Brocade vision for the network – a fabric-based network – enables our customers to simplify and automate their networks, as well as dramatically improve network efficiency, utilization and performance. It also represents another logical step on the path toward mass customer adoption of SDN, which is what respondents say they need,” added Nolet.

Other key findings from the research included:

·         75 percent of respondents would welcome the use of an “on-demand” data center model (a purpose-built network infrastructure for highly virtualized and cloud computing environments)

·         Complexity (20 percent), cost (19 percent) and performance (14 percent) are the biggest data center challenges facing senior ITDMs

·         17 percent of enterprises have no plans to evaluate SDN, and 16 percent feel the same towards fabric-based architectures

·         On average, 49 percent of servers are currently virtualized with this rising to an average of 64 percent in two years

·         It currently takes an average of four days to provision a new device or application, and five days to provision a new service

·         35 percent of departments have looked to deploy cloud-based services in order to enhance their IT experience, but have done so without engaging the company’s IT organization

Brocade leads the way in SDN technologies to help unleash the power, intelligence and analytics of networks with a flexible, end-to-end cloud-based solution. To pave the way for SDN, Brocade VCS Fabric technology helps organizations create efficient data center networks that just work. Ethernet fabrics built on Brocade VCS Fabric technology provide unmatched automation, efficiency and VM awareness compared to traditional network architectures and competitive fabric offerings. In addition, they increase flexibility and IT agility, enabling organizations to transition smoothly to elastic, mission-critical networks in highly virtualized cloud data centers

For more information, visit www.brocade.com or ww.brocade.com/networkfacts.

* The study, commissioned by Brocade, was conducted by third-party research firm Vanson Bourne, and surveyed 400 senior ITDMs from large enterprises in the UK and US.

China’s Answer to Pixar Selects Brocade Ethernet Fabric to Power State-of-the-Art 3D Animated Movie Production

Light Chaser Animation Studios Deploys Low-Latency Ethernet Fabric Spanning Two Sites

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia; April 28, 2014 - – Light Chaser Animation Studios, a startup computer graphics animation company based in Beijing, has deployed a new high-performance fabric-based network from Brocade to support its animation production business. The new network links storage and computing resources at Light Chaser’s data center with artists’ workstations at Light Chaser’s main office in a seamless Ethernet fabric that delivers the wire-speed, low-latency performance required for 3D animation production.

Light Chaser was founded last year by Gary Wang, the founder and former CEO of the country’s most popular video-sharing Web site, Tudou.com. Its goal is to produce world-class animated movies and capitalize on the opportunities in China’s rapidly growing movie market, which expanded by 28 percent last year and is widely expected to overtake the US in market size by 2020.

“At the moment there’s a distinct lack of high-quality CG animation content being produced in China, so we’re aiming to fill that gap by creating world-class animated movies. Doing so requires world-class animation talent and world-class technology, which is where the new network from Brocade comes in,” said Ye Yuan, Head of Technology of Light Chaser Animation Studios.

“As a startup, we’ve been able to deploy the latest and most cutting-edge technology to support studio operations. This includes 900 terabytes of network-attached storage (NAS), a 400-server render farm and 200 animation workstations. Tying these all together to create an efficiently functioning whole that gives us maximum performance, however, required a seamless network that could handle our highly demanding workload, as each frame in a digital production file is now a few gigabytes.”

The Brocade® solution was a unified Ethernet fabric built around the Brocade VDX® family of Ethernet switches. These switches feature Brocade VCS® Fabric technology, which has enabled Light Chaser to create a seamless network at its data center and artists’ studio that is practically self-managing.

Within the data center, Brocade VDX 6710 Switches have been deployed as top-of-rack (TOR) switches to provide wire-speed Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) connectivity to the 400 multiprocessor, multicore servers that provide the computing power for Light Chaser’s video rendering. The switches feature hardware-based inter-switch trunking capabilities, enabling them to be linked over their 10 GbE ports in a cluster that acts as a single, highly resilient virtual device. This approach delivers port-to-port latency of just 600 nanoseconds, allowing rapid intercommunication between the render farm servers.

A Brocade VDX 6720 switch also forms part of Light Chaser’s data center switching cluster, providing 10 GbE pathways to the server switches and connecting the NAS array into the network over multiple 10 GbE links. It also supports dual 10 GbE links, over fiber-optic connections, to another Brocade VDX 6720 switch that is clustered with several Brocade VDX 6710 switches at the Light Chaser studio site. The latter provides wire-speed GbE connectivity to the animation artists’ workstations.

“The beauty of this design is that it creates a single Ethernet fabric that spans Light Chaser’s two sites, delivering high capacity and low-latency connectivity across its entire IT infrastructure,” said Sam Lo, regional director for China, Brocade. “It is also ridiculously easy to manage since, as a single virtual device, configuration information is shared between all the Brocade VDX switches in the fabric. It is very much a plug-and-play network. When Light Chaser needs more network capacity to support additional servers or workstations, it can simply add another switch into the fabric cluster.”

Brocade Names Gabriel Breeman as OEM Director for Asia-Pacific

Industry veteran rejoins Brocade to lead regional OEM strategies and strategic partnerships under the newly-created role

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia; April 22, 2014 –  Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced the appointment of Gabriel Breeman to the newly created position of OEM director for Asia Pacific (APAC). In this role, Breeman will drive OEM strategies, strategic partnerships and alliance initiatives for the region to help position Brocade as the data centre networking partner of choice in the OEM partner business segment. Breeman will be based in Singapore and report directly to Brocade vice president for Asia Pacific (APAC), Adam Judd.

Breeman was most recently the senior director for Global OEM at Fusion-io, where he was responsible for leading worldwide revenue growth strategies through OEM partners. Prior to Fusion-io, Breeman spent six years at Brocade as a Global Sales Executive and Corporate Account Director. He has also held direct end-user, indirect channel and OEM leadership roles at Dot Hill Systems and Sun Microsystems during his 20-year career in the Information Technology sector.

“Strategic partnerships with the world’s leading vendors continue to be a vital go-to-market strategy for Brocade globally and regionally. These OEM partnerships are based upon the value of open standards-based computing, networking and storage platforms, which is paving the way for software-defined networking to deliver on its full promise,” said Adam Judd, vice president for APAC at Brocade. “Gabriel’s astute understanding of the OEM ecosystem will bring tremendous value in ensuring Brocade and our OEM partners in APAC share a common vision on open networking and how to disrupt the status quo in the networking industry. I am delighted to have him rejoin Brocade to lead our regional OEM partner business at this exciting time.”

Brocade’s worldwide OEM partners include EMC, Dell, Fujitsu, HP, Hitachi Data Systems, IBM and NetApp.

“Brocade has entrenched relationships with its OEM partners, and is uniquely poised to capitalize on the challenges and opportunities confronting the networking industry today by offering customers an alternative route to success,” said Gabriel Breeman. “I am looking forward to working closely with our OEM partners to help transform our customers’ networks and deliver a compelling value proposition for their businesses.”

Brocade Appoints Matt Kolon as Chief Technology Officer for Asia-Pacific

Data Centre Networking Veteran to Lead and Align the Company’s Technology Strategy with Regional Customer Needs

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia; April 17, 2014 –  Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced the appointment of Matt Kolon to the role of chief technology officer (CTO) for Asia Pacific (APAC). In this new role, Kolon will be responsible for leading the company’s technology strategy and product roadmap within APAC. He will also help align technology initiatives and execution closely with customer needs across the region, particularly in the areas of network functions virtualization (NFV) and software-defined networking (SDN). Kolon will be based in Beijing, China, and report directly to Brocade vice president for APAC, Adam Judd.

With more than 15 years of specialized industry experience in developing long-term technical strategies with customers and partners, Kolon was most recently the APAC managing director for Evolved Programmable Network business and CTO for Service Providers at Cisco. Prior to Cisco, he spent 12 years at Juniper Networks, holding various executive roles in customer service, sales and marketing, and systems engineering.

“2014 will be the year where service providers, specifically those in APAC, start to test and deploy SDN in their data centers to drive growth and innovation for their businesses,” said Adam Judd, vice president for Asia Pacific at Brocade. “Matt is an industry visionary who has been working closely with customers and partners in APAC in understanding their needs and transforming their networks. We are very pleased to have him on our regional leadership team as the value he brings to our customers and partners will be tremendous.”

According to the Datacenter Dynamics, Asia Pacific data center spending is forecast to reach US$15.6 billion in 2014, representing an 8.6 percent growth, driven by investment in data center infrastructure management, containerized data centers and modular offerings.

“Brocade is in a unique position to capture historic industry shifts and opportunities in software networking given its strong support of open networking standards and proven leadership in Ethernet fabrics,” said Matt Kolon. “I am thrilled to join Brocade at this exciting time to help our regional customers and partners realize the benefits of this new network paradigm. The Brocade approach will help enterprises and service providers simplify the transition of their networks to drive new levels of business transformation.”

Brocade Names Christine Heckart as Chief Marketing Officer

Industry Veteran to Lead Company’s Drive to Position Itself as the ‘Network Provider of Choice to the World’s Data Centers’

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia.; March 12, 2014 – :  Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD) today announced the appointment of Christine Heckart to the position of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).  In this role, Ms. Heckart will be responsible for the strategic direction of Brocade’s global marketing organization, helping to position the company as the network provider of choice to the world’s data centers.  Ms. Heckart will report directly to Brocade’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Lloyd Carney.

In her new role, Ms. Heckart will be instrumental in driving the strategy to generate brand awareness and to develop and execute demand generation programs across the globe. These Marketing initiatives will align and support the company’s business strategy for growth built on leading the industry in data center fabrics and driving market penetration in the emerging Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) arenas.

“The data center must transform to meet the IT demands of the modern era that are driven by cloud, virtualization and mobility,” said Lloyd Carney, CEO at Brocade.  “With our focus and world-class innovation, Brocade is uniquely qualified to help customers through this important transformation. Christine’s marketing experience and expertise are well suited to help propel Brocade forward in the global marketplace to drive demand for our next-generation solutions.”

With more than 25 years of experience in the high-tech industry, Ms. Heckart has held a number of senior marketing leadership positions at networking and other high tech   companies.  Most recently at ServiceSource, a SaaS provider that helps drive recurring revenue she served as EVP Strategy, Marketing, People and Systems where she was responsible for establishing a new market around recurring revenue management.  Prior to that Ms. Heckart held CMO roles at NetApp and Juniper Networks, as well as being General Manager, TV, Video and Music Business at Microsoft.  Heckart serves on the Board of Directors at Lam Research, a leading provider of wafer fabrication equipment to the semiconductor industry.

“With the adoption of fabric-based networking, NFV, SDN, and cloud-based computing, end users are actively seeking technology partners that can help them drive business transformation,” said Christie Heckart. “I am excited by Brocade’s differentiated solutions, and believe we are well-positioned to drive the next wave of data center innovation.  Brocade’s 18 year heritage in the data center and its partner ecosystem is well-renowned and I believe it is an exciting time to join the company.”

Brocade Appoints Avnet Technology Solutions to Expand Distribution Network in South East Asia

The Partnership Aims to Deepen Brocade’s Market Penetration across the Government, Telecommunications, Financial Services, manufacturing and Enterprise Sectors

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia —Feb. 28, 2014: – Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced the appointment of Avnet Technology Solutions, the global IT solutions distributor and an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), as a Brocade IP and SAN Distributor for South East Asia (SEA), spanning Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam. A member of the Brocade Alliance Partner Network (APN) program, Avnet now has an extended distributorship agreement with Brocade from the Americas, Europe and Australia to South East Asia.

According to research and consulting firm BroadGroup, SEA markets will see sustained investment in data centers with a predicted 40 percent capacity increase by 2015. The continued growth is driven by many factors, ranging from the growth in mobile data to the emergence of the cloud and the market entry of many large-scale data center solution vendors. Additionally, Forrester Research forecasts that the Asia-Pacific cloud computing market will grow from US$6.9 billion in 2013 to US$31.9 billion in 2020, with the SEA region growing at a 24.7 percent compounded annual growth rate.

Bennett Wong, vice president and general manager for Avnet Technology Solutions, ASEAN, commented, “We look forward to our expanded relationship with Brocade, which spans the U.S., Europe, Australia and now South East Asia. Brocade represents an ongoing OEM business partnership. Together, we provide integration services, as well as other channel enablement and sales support. This agreement strengthens the business we already do with Brocade within our OEM community. It also creates opportunities for our channel partners to benefit from offering Brocade solutions that address market demand in mobility, Big Data and cloud computing.”

Under the agreement, Avnet will distribute Brocade® IP, SAN and software networking products to its network of channel partners and resellers across the region, including Ethernet fabric solutions for data center networking and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) solutions for Software-Defined Networking (SDN). Avnet will work closely with Brocade to develop its solution support expertise and accelerate Brocade go-to-market initiatives through training, certification, partner enablement and targeted sales and marketing programs. Both companies are also developing demo capabilities to bolster proof-of-concept activities.

“CIOs today are pushing cloud computing projects while keeping a close watch on new technologies such as Big Data analytics and SDN,” said Lily Foo, Brocade Head for South East Asia. “The market is burgeoning with opportunities for Brocade to deliver business-critical data center solutions to meet the evolving needs of our customers, especially through our Ethernet fabric and software networking solutions. Avnet’s appointment is a strategic move toward deepening our footprint in SEA, and across targeted industry verticals including government, telecommunications, financial services, manufacturing and commercial markets.”

Brocade Names Adam Judd as Vice President for Asia Pacific

Networking Industry Veteran Joins Brocade to Drive Regional Growth

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia —Jan . 21, 2014: Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced the appointment of Adam Judd to the role of vice president for Asia Pacific (APAC). Judd will be responsible for the strategic direction and management of all sales and business development across the region, delivering aggressive growth targets for the Brocade® Ethernet/IP business and further strengthening the company’s partner and channel strategies.

Judd will be based in Singapore and will report directly to senior vice president of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations, Jeff Lindholm.

According to IDC, ICT spending in the APAC region, excluding Japan (APEJ), is expected to grow by nine percent in 2014, driven by large markets such as China, India and Indonesia. IDC forecasts that enterprises that are moving towards the cloud in an aggressive fashion will look for a software-defined data centre, as application-aware environments become increasingly critical. The future of the data centre is anticipated to include general-purpose servers and specialty systems that can manage varied workloads. To capitalize on this growth and target the data centre marketplace more aggressively, Brocade has specific business initiatives in place, as outlined at its recent Analyst & Technology Day. Mr. Judd is tasked with building on these initiatives and spearheading growth across APAC.

Mr. Judd brings over 15 years of leadership experience and an impressive track record in data centre networking, enterprise technology and telecommunications to Brocade. He was most recently the acting CEO and Chairman of Tortuga Mobile, a privately held firm that provides mobile payment solutions and services to retailers, financial institutions and mobile carriers.

Prior to Tortuga Mobile, Mr. Judd was senior vice president for APAC at Juniper Networks, where he led the company’s sales and services operations in more than 12 countries, including Japan. Under his leadership, the company’s regional revenue quadrupled. Mr. Judd assumed the regional leadership role in 2002 as a result of Juniper’s acquisition of Unisphere Networks, a company that he cofounded in 1999. He also previously held APAC management positions with Bay Networks and Nortel Networks.

“APAC continues to be one of the fastest growing regions for Brocade and will constitute a larger component of our global business,” said Jeff Lindholm, senior vice president of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations at Brocade. “Adam is an enterprising, dynamic and passionate leader who has both the global foresight and the necessary industry knowledge that is deeply rooted in Asia. His track record and achievements across the Ethernet networking and service provider markets are outstanding. We strongly believe he has all the right qualities that will prove vital in taking Brocade to the next level in APAC.”

“The data centre networking industry is undergoing transformative changes and Brocade is poised to lead that transformation by leveraging its strong innovation heritage, customer focus and partner ecosystem. Now is a great time to rejoin the industry, and I am very excited to lead Brocade in APAC by building on its strengths and understanding customer needs,” said Adam Judd. “Brocade has led the industry on many fronts, including Ethernet fabrics, network virtualization and software-defined networking. I am committed to working closely with our customers and partners in meeting their needs and bringing these innovations to them in the most accessible way.”

Brocade Welcomes Network Virtualization Industry Luminary, Benson Schliesser

Distinguished Engineer to Drive Company’s Network Virtualization Strategies

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia —Jan . 15, 2014: Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) announced today the appointment of networking luminary Benson Schliesser to the position of Distinguished Engineer. With a deep background in network architectures, cloud computing and data centers, Schliesser will play an integral role in the direction of Brocade Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) strategies and work with customers to ensure the resulting products meet their requirements.

Schliesser will join the Office of the CTO and report to Ken Cheng, chief technology officer and vice president, corporate development and emerging business.

“Benson’s history of leadership roles as an end-user, a vendor and in industry associations is a clear indication of his broad understanding of the evolving networking landscape and technologies,” said Cheng. “His past experience with leading large-scale cloud service rollouts and data center virtualization deployments will make Benson an invaluable resource for Brocade customers who are focused on adopting SDN and NFV technologies.”

At Brocade, Schliesser will focus on strategic initiatives to further Brocade leadership in the key areas of Ethernet fabrics, software networking and data center routing and switching. Additionally, he will work with customers to design next-generation architectures to rapidly deliver new services.

With nearly two decades of networking architecture experience, Schliesser has spent his career designing and deploying next-generation data center and cloud services. Most recently, he served as a distinguished engineer in the office of the CTO at Juniper and prior to that as a principal engineer in the service provider CTO office at Cisco. Earlier in his career, he spent more than a decade in the office of the CTO at Savvis and oversaw the network architecture of the company’s many cloud based services.

Deeply involved in a number of industry associations, Schliesser is currently a chair of the Network Virtualization Overlay (NVO3) Working Group for the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). He is also a member of ETSI ISG NFV, IEEE Communications Society, OpenDaylight Project and other organizations

“The feverish pace of a software-focused networking industry is creating a gap between customers and some vendors as both parties try to keep pace with new architectures,” said Schliesser. “In combining its pedigree of storage networking with the innovations in both Fabric and virtual routing technologies, Brocade has the most complete vision and mix of assets to successfully help customers build next-generation cloud and data center environments.”

Schliesser joins other notable Brocade employees involved in and leading industry associations, including:
• Curt Beckmann – Chair of Forward Abstraction Working Group, Open Networking Foundation
• David Meyer - Chair of Technical Steering Committee, Board Member, OpenDaylight Project
• Scott Kipp – President, Ethernet Alliance
• David Peterson – International Representative for Technical Committee T11, InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS)
• Steve Wilson – Chair of Technical Committee T11, InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS)

Brocade Launches First Purpose-Built Network Switch for Scale-Out Campus Aggregation

Brocade ICX 7750 Switch Provides Unmatched 10 and 40 GbE Density and TCO

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia —Nov. 20, 2013: Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced an addition to the company's campus networking family with the new Brocade® ICX® 7750 Switch, which delivers the simplification and automation provided by the Brocade HyperEdge™ Architecture. The Brocade ICX 7750 is the first high-density 10/40 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) fixed-port solution purposely designed to enable scale-out solutions for campus aggregation.

The switch enables the scale-out of campus aggregation networks, helping organizations seamlessly add network capacity in an agile, cost-efficient manner. The Brocade ICX 7750 will be shown for the first time at SuperComputing 2013 this week in Denver, Colorado.

As organizations such as research, education and government agencies feel the impact of mobile and social trends on their IT infrastructure, many are in need of a refresh for their IT networks. The primary reason for a refresh is that traditional networks are not suited for the delivery of large quantities of data, the proliferation of mobile devices and the additional layers of security required today.

Highlights of the Brocade ICX 7750:
• Agility and Performance
o Delivers unprecedented port density and scalability for a 10/40 GbE fixed-port stackable switch (available second half 2014)
 Up to 3,000 1/10 GbE ports, or 800 40 GbE ports in a single logical device
 Up to 82 terabits per second of aggregate switching capacity
 Up to 46 billion packets per second of aggregate forwarding capacity
 SDN-ready with true Hybrid Port mode support for OpenFlow 1.3

• Value
o Scale-out economics: progressively add switching capability at the core/aggregation layer when needed
o Optical stacking links for distributed aggregation/core layer across the campus, delivering switching capacity where needed
o Total cost of ownership (TCO) advantages of a fixed-port solution
o Brocade Assurance Lifetime Limited Warranty

• Automation and Resiliency
o Chassis-level resiliency, high availability and manageability
 Single point of management
 A Quad Core processor allowing for In-Service Software Updates (ISSU) within a single unit, as well as hitless failover
 Built-in resiliency, including a separate control and data stacking links for greater system reliability
 Hot-swap alert latch to help ensure data integrity when removing or inserting the high-performance 6×40 GbE module while the switch is operating
 Enterprise-grade advanced features such as Virtual Router Redundancy Protocol Extended (VRRPe), Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), robust IPV4/IPV6 support, Multi-Chassis Trunking (MCT), and Virtual Routing and Forwarding (VRF)

• Additional Information
o Three models available:
 26 fixed 40 GbE and six 40 GbE slot module
 48 fixed 10 GbE and six fixed 40 GbE + 6×40 GbE slot
 48 10GBase-T and six fixed 40 GbE +6×40 GbE slot
o Will receive the same Federal certifications held by other Brocade ICX switches

Pricing and Availability
List pricing for the Brocade ICX 7750 Switch starts at $21,500 with the first customer shipment and general availability in early 2014. The Brocade ICX 7750 comes with a Brocade Assurance Limited Lifetime Warranty. Brocade networking solutions are available direct, through Brocade channel partners and via Brocade Network Subscription.

Brocade Drives Physical and Virtual Networking Advancements with OpenStack Contributions

Brocade to introduce blueprint for Dynamic Network Resource Management and discuss other technology contributions at OpenStack Summit

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia —Oct. 31, 2013: During next week’s OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong, Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) will discuss and demonstrate its blueprint proposal to extend the advanced networking capabilities of the OpenStack Networking framework, Neutron. The Dynamic Network Resource Manager (DNRM) blueprint is intended to simplify the deployment and management of physical and virtual networking resources within cloud infrastructures.

Public and private clouds are evolving beyond homogeneous, pooled resources as organizations seek to deliver improved efficiency and choice through multivendor support. By leveraging a native, heterogeneous approach delivered by DNRM, OpenStack cloud environments can address the needs of specific applications or services.

Highlights of the Brocade DNRM proposal include:
• Policy-based management of physical and virtual network resources from multiple vendors that will allow OpenStack Neutron to deliver operational efficiency and flexibility for Layers 3-7 of the network
• Four primary components - Supervisor, Interceptor, Plugins and Appliance Container – and several supporting elements, such as a management dashboard
• Support for emerging technologies, such as Network Functions Virtualization (NFV)
• Continued work with partners of the OpenStack community to deliver DNRM capabilities as part of the Spring 2014 OpenStack release, codenamed “IceHouse”
• A proof-of-concept implementation of DNRM that will be demonstrated at the OpenStack Summit

Brocade is also updating several other OpenStack contributions in its continued drive toward open networking solutions.

Currently available Brocade contributions to OpenStack:
• Red Hat Certification of the Brocade® VCS® Fabric plugin as part of RHEL OpenStack distribution
o Red Hat Certification provides customers assurance that OpenStack-related technologies have been thoroughly tested and are supported by Red Hat and Brocade.  
• Part of the recent OpenStack release “Havana,” the Brocade VCS plugin has been enhanced such that OpenStack now has a single logical interface to the entire Brocade Ethernet Fabric instead of interfacing with individual switches.

Proposed Brocade contributions for IceHouse Release:
• Brocade SAN Fibre Channel, Brocade ADX® Load Balancing as a Service (LBaaS) and OpenStack solution with Brocade Vyatta® vRouter plugins are planned for the Spring 2014 release.
• Code from the approved SAN Fibre Channel zone management blueprint is planned for the Spring 2014 IceHouse release.

OpenStack Summit attendees can visit Brocade booth C43 for product demonstrations. Additionally, Brocade will be leading several speaking sessions that range from customer use cases to contribution deep dives:
• Tuesday, Nov. 5
o Demo Theater – Brocade innovations with OpenStack (10:45 a.m.)
o Yahoo! Japan case study (5 p.m.)
• Thursday, Nov. 7
o Taking Advantage of Fibre Channel SAN Infrastructure in OpenStack Environments (11 a.m.)
o Rackspace Hybrid Cloud and Brocade Vyatta vRouter Deliver On-Demand Networking  and Enhanced Security with OpenStack (11:30 a.m.)

Brocade Names Ari Bose as Chief Information Officer

Industry Veteran to Drive IT Transformation, Enhance Customer Experience and Develop a Showcase IT Organization

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia —Oct. 18, 2013: Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD) today announced the appointment of Ari Bose to the position of Chief Information Officer (CIO). Responsible for the strategic transformation of the global Brocade IT organization, Bose will report to Gale England, vice president of Customer Advocacy and Operational Effectiveness.

The data center networking industry is in the midst of a dramatic transformation. With increasing pressure being placed on corporate networks to manage rising data volumes and extract the most value out of existing assets in order to increase business efficiency, IT organizations are now a strategic business partner and no longer a back-office function.

In his new position, Bose will leverage Brocade’s world-class portfolio of data center networking solutions and partner solutions to create an IT function that can drive the company forward and become a showcase for the industry. Specifically, Bose is tasked with standardizing the company’s internal IT systems to support cross-functional collaboration and manage information security and risk. One major initiative is to continue expanding the company’s network-centric virtualization strategy in which Brocade currently operates at more than 70 percent virtual workloads.

“Brocade is at the forefront of data center networking innovation, ushering in a new era of networking through revolutionary technologies such as Ethernet fabrics, network functions virtualization, and software-defined networking,” said England. “We also lead by example, leveraging state-of-the-art solutions within our own environment to drive the business forward. For example, Brocade has put its IT innovation into action by deploying a world-class, ultra-modern and energy-efficient data center. This facility serves as a showcase for the possibilities of dynamic, virtualized data centers—as well as strategic ‘green’ initiatives. Ari’s appointment is pivotal in advancing our stance in this respect.”

With more than 30 years of experience in the high-tech industry, Bose has held a number of CIO positions at networking and other high-tech companies. Most recently at Polycom, he served as senior vice president and CIO, where he led the transformation of the global IT organization. He was also responsible for overseeing the company’s internal global visual communications network. Prior to that, Bose was senior vice president and CIO at UTStarcom, and he has held senior IT positions at companies such as 3Com, Bay Networks and Apple.

“It is fair to say that the networking market is changing at an exponential pace, driven largely by user demands and fiscal pressures,” said Bose. “Brocade has almost 20 years of experience in driving data center innovation, and I am thrilled at the prospect of continuing this heritage. I am excited about how the data center of the future can drive business transformation. I hope that by seeing how we are embracing fabrics and a highly virtualized architecture, other businesses will understand how Brocade can empower change within their own environments.”

New Compact PoE Switch from Brocade Targets Federal Market

Brocade ICX 6450 Features Added Security and Certifications for Public Sector

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia —Oct. 17, 2013: Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) has announced an addition to the company's campus networking portfolio with the Brocade® ICX® 6450-C Switch, which delivers enterprise-class features in a compact form, and supports the simplification and automation provided by the Brocade HyperEdge™ Architecture. Executing on the company's strategy to deliver innovation for specific customer segments, the Brocade ICX 6450-C is designed for the unique and stringent requirements of US Federal agencies and public sector organizations.

The Brocade ICX 6450-C further expands the company's comprehensive core-to-edge switch portfolio, a key factor in the recent announcement with Aruba to deliver secure integrated wired and wireless mobility solutions for enterprise and public sector customers based on open standards and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) principles. This integrated solution enables Federal agencies to deploy a secure, modern, enterprise network that is simple to maintain and responsive to the evolving needs of warfighter and civilian missions through operational efficiency and optimal total cost of ownership (TCO).

What's new for the Brocade ICX 6450-C:

• Enterprise-class networking switch in a compact form factor
o Small, fan-less and completely silent.
o Can be deployed outside the wiring closet without interfering with work activity in areas.
o Runs the same software as the rest of the Brocade ICX and Brocade FCX switch families.
o Enterprise-class CLI and management features for full functionality, enabling advanced management through Brocade Network Advisor.
o With Layer 3 and GRE tunnel support, a fan-less design and Power over Ethernet (PoE), the switch can be easy deployed in work environments or remote locations.

• Designed and optimized for the stringent requirements of US Federal agencies
o MACsec-ready for improved security to protect sensitive information moving across networks.
o Manufactured in the US to meet federal regulations.
o In process to receive the Joint Interoperability Test Command Approved Product List (JITC APL) Certification, joining the rest of the Brocade ICX switch family.

• Other technical specifications:
o 12 × 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports
o 4 × 1 GbE Uplinks (2x RJ45 + 2x SFP)
o 4 × PoE/PoE+ ports
o Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) hardware-ready
o sFlow-enabled for high-performance network monitoring

Pricing and Availability
List pricing of the Brocade ICX 6450-C Switch is $1595 with the first customer shipment on October 11, 2013 and general availability on October 31, 2013. Brocade networking solutions are available direct, through Brocade channel partners and via Brocade Network Subscription.

Brocade and EMC Work Together to Enable Software-Defined Storage for EMC Fibre Channel SAN Install Base

New EMC ViPR Software-Defined Storage Platform Now Shipping with Integrated Brocade SAN Management Technology; Enables Immediate Virtualization Functionality for 50,000 Joint EMC/Brocade SAN Customers 

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia —Oct. 2, 2013: Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD), the leader in data center fabric networking solutions, today announced that the company’s storage area networking (SAN) management technology is now available for more than 50,000 joint EMC and Brocade customers to immediately realize the virtualization benefits of the EMC® ViPR™ Software-Defined Storage Platform within highly virtualized cloud environments.

Specifically, Brocade® Network Advisor SAN management software has been integrated with the EMC ViPR platform to create a modern storage architecture that enables policy-based automation for managing and provisioning both EMC and non-EMC storage infrastructure using the industry-standard Storage Management Initiative (SMI) interface. This integration will help reduce data center costs and complexity for both current and future application deployments by taking advantage of Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN solutions enhanced with Brocade Fabric Vision™ technology. Brocade Network Advisor is sold by EMC as Connectrix® Manager Converged Network Edition (CMCNE).

As a result of the joint efforts, EMC SAN customers can now utilize the EMC ViPR platform to leverage existing storage infrastructures for traditional data center workloads, as well as provision new EMC ViPR Object Data Service and EMC ViPR HDFS Service through access to Amazon S3 and OpenStack Swift for next-generation workloads. This complete spectrum of capabilities can be run with enterprise storage, including the EMC VMAX®, VPLEX®, VNX®, Atmos® and Isilon® families, as well as commodity storage.

EMC ViPR is the world’s first software-defined storage platform that is designed to provide the ability to manage both storage infrastructure (called the Control Plane) and the data stored within that infrastructure (called the Data Plane). It masks the complexity behind configuring and managing storage infrastructure, providing single point-and-click management for complex, heterogeneous storage functions.

“Fibre Channel continues to be the dominant storage type deployed for virtualized environments and the Brocade integration with the EMC ViPR platform enhances those deployments by enabling new use cases built on top of the most reliable and highest-performing storage network,” said Jack Rondoni, Vice President, Data Center Storage and Solutions. “Brocade and EMC customers can leverage existing and future investments in Fibre Channel SAN with full confidence, knowing that Brocade and EMC are both fully committed to making Fibre Channel an integral storage type in the Software-Defined Data Center.”

“We have worked with Brocade to ensure seamless integration of the networking stack with the ViPR platform,” said Christopher Ratcliffe, Vice President of Marketing, Advanced Software Division, EMC Corporation. “The result is a simple-to-use solution that automates and defines policies across the entire storage environment to further improve the utilization of our customers’ existing and future storage investments.”

Availability and Pricing
The EMC ViPR platform is now available from EMC and its global network of channel partners. For pricing information, please contact EMC at emc.com.

Brocade and Aruba Collaborate to Eliminate Cisco Campus Lock-In

Relationship Focused On Delivering Effortless and Secure Network Mobility through Open Standards and Application of SDN

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia, Sept. 25, 2013 - Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) and Aruba Networks Inc. (NASDAQ: ARUN), today announced a strategic relationship to deliver an open-standards based unified campus network to support secure mobility, the proliferation of mobile devices within campus environments, Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) initiatives and emerging technologies, such as Software-Defined Networking (SDN). The resulting integrated wired and wireless solution provides a best-of-breed approach that enables customers to eliminate vendor lock-in and reduce total cost of ownership by nearly half as compared to equivalent offerings.

Through this relationship, Brocade and Aruba will jointly develop and bring to market solutions across multiple industries, including U.S. federal government. With integrated solutions already deployed worldwide, Brocade and Aruba will collaborate on R&D to bring tighter integration for a simplified and agile wired and wireless campus network.

“Campus networks are buckling under the proliferation of today’s mobile initiatives, which makes this space ripe for disruption and ready for the application of intelligent solutions,” said Lloyd Carney, Chief Executive Officer, Brocade. “We view the campus network as the on-ramp to the virtualized data center and look forward to collaborating with Aruba to apply our cloud and SDN technologies to create a more unified and simplified solution.”

The shift to enterprise mobility breaks legacy three-tier network architectures with an overlay wireless tier. As a result, IT departments are struggling to provide differentiated experiences and security for an ever increasingly mobile user community and its growing number of devices and applications. To address these customer pain points, Brocade and Aruba are pairing the scalable and simplified network operation of Brocade® HyperEdge™ architecture with the rich context of user, device, application and location information inherent in the Aruba Mobile Virtual Enterprise (MOVE) architecture to deliver secure mobile user experiences for customers. The result is a simplified, mobility-centric campus network solution that operates with context-based access and policy management for every user, regardless of how they connect.

“We believe customers have two choices to consider as they contend with the remarkable changes brought on by the growth of mobile devices and the BYOD trend,” said Dominic Orr, Chief Executive Officer, Aruba Networks. “The legacy, port-based route brings more complexity, lock-in and expense, whereas the mobility-centric approach from Aruba and Brocade is based on open standards and delivers the freedom of choice and lower costs.”

Brocade and Aruba will also embark on a broader technology initiative to apply SDN principles to campus networks. Utilizing open standards to replace legacy multi-tier network architectures, Brocade and Aruba engineers will work to develop a campus network virtualization solution designed to bring unprecedented performance and operational efficiencies, including:

Automated IT operations with zero-touch network expansion
Enriched peer-to-peer application experiences, such as Microsoft Lync and Apple AirPlay
Reduced acquisition costs compared to premiums associated with Cisco lock-in

“Over the past five years, Layer 3 Communications has deployed integrated wired and wireless solutions from Brocade and Aruba across numerous customer accounts, all of whom have benefited greatly from the increased automation and simplified network architectures,” said Rodney Turner, President and Chief Executive Officer, Layer 3 Communications. “The best-of-breed solutions from Brocade and Aruba enable our customers to appropriately unite the campus edge network with the core data center for an end-to-end solution and at a fraction of the acquisition and operating costs of other solutions.”

Brocade and Aruba are committed to helping current and prospective customers reach a desired end-state. Brocade will support customers and partners through this transition away from its current OEM products and to the strategic integrated solutions with Aruba.

Brocade Names Bill Lipsin as Vice President of Worldwide Channel and Global Systems Integrator Sales

Industry veteran tasked with driving growth across Brocade’s go-to-market partners, and help them leverage data center networking opportunities across the globe

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia; September 9, 2013 – Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD), today announced the appointment of Bill Lipsin to the position of Vice President of Worldwide Channel and Global Systems Integrator Sales.  Mr. Lipsin is responsible for the overall direction and management of all sales, marketing and business development operations for Brocade’s channel organization, and the strategic direction and operational management of the company’s Global Systems Integrator (GSI) team.  Mr. Lipsin will report directly to Brocade’s Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales, Jeff Lindholm.

In his new role at Brocade, Mr. Lipsin will be responsible for developing go-to-market strategies and working with the company’s global sales and marketing organizations to define and accelerate channel recruitment and sales programs.  Critically, his task will be to enable partners and GSIs to leverage key industry trends such as data center virtualization, cloud computing and software-defined networking to drive revenue.  Within the GSI space, Mr. Lipsin will position Brocade as the de facto networking vendor of choice, and work with partners to ensure that customers benefit from Brocade’s industry-leading portfolio of solutions.

“91 percent of IT decision makers admit that their data center networks need upgrading, and many of these will turn to either GSIs or the channel to fulfill their needs,” said Jeff Lindholm, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales at Brocade.  “In order to leverage customer demand for robust and agile data center networks, Brocade’s partner landscape needs to be able to deliver strategic counsel and technical excellence across the board.  Bill’s track record of building robust partner sales organizations is second to none, and I am confident that he has the right mix of industry knowledge, business acumen and leadership skills to drive continued growth across Brocade’s go-to-market ecosystem.”

With more than 30 years of experience in the high-tech industry, Mr. Lipsin has held a number of sales and marketing leadership positions at networking and telecommunications technology companies.  Most recently at Arbor Networks, a provider of network security and management solutions for enterprise and service provider networks, he served as Global Vice President of Channels and Alliances where he was responsible for establishing a new go-to-market strategy for the company, taking a traditionally direct sales model and creating a partner sales strategy from the ground up.

Prior to that Mr. Lipsin ran the Global Channels team at CA Technologies, and has held senior executive roles at a number of leading technology companies such as Bay Networks and IBM.

“With the uptake of fabric-based networking and the drive to cloud-based computing, coupled with the acceptance of new technologies such as software-defined networking and network function virtualization, end users are actively seeking technology partners that can help them drive business transformation through innovation,” commented Bill Lipsin.  “I am excited by Brocade’s market proposition, and feel that we are well-positioned to drive the next wave of data center innovation.  Brocade’s partner ecosystem is one of the best in the industry, and I am committed to leading a talented organization and ensuring that we have the right strategy in place that will enable us to quickly respond to customer (and partner) needs and fully capitalize on market opportunities as they present themselves.”

Brocade Collaborates with VMware to Improve SAN Management Control of Virtualized Data Centers

New Brocade SAN Analytics Integration for VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite Correlates SAN Health with VM Performance to Simplify Operations, Lower Costs and Increase Application Availability

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia; August 27, 2013 – Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD), the leader in fabric networking solutions, today announced the company has collaborated with VMware to develop a new management pack that enables enterprises to proactively manage Fibre Channel storage area networks (SANs) operating within highly virtualized environments to lower operational costs and increase application availability.

Specifically, Brocade has collaborated with VMware to develop the Brocade SAN Analytics Management Pack for the VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite™, which automatically sends real-time SAN health and performance metrics information from Brocade SAN fabrics into vCenter Operations Management Suite. The integration leverages the unique behavioral learning functionality in vCenter Operations Management Suite to provide useful baseline metrics and trending information for data traffic, as well as identifying SAN bottlenecks between servers and storage to enable more proactive application performance monitoring. This further simplifies SAN operations management and lowers operational costs by reducing the time to troubleshoot issues—thereby resulting in faster recovery and increased availability of VM-resident applications.

According to Gartner, “SAN fabrics are a critical part of the IT infrastructure and, therefore, must be actively monitored. As servers are consolidated using hypervisors in virtual server environments, greater demands are placed on the storage infrastructure, because each physical server contains more applications and uses more SAN fabric resources. As a result, the loss of a storage connection to a single physical server that hosts many virtual hosts has a greater service impact.”1

“Today IT staff have limited visibility into the Fibre Channel SAN from VMware management tools, leading to more time spent troubleshooting issues and increased downtime, degraded application performance, and underutilized resources,” said Jack Rondoni, vice president, data center storage and solutions, at Brocade. “With the Brocade SAN Analytics integration with vCenter Operations Management Suite, administrators will have an aggregated view across the entire virtual infrastructure within vCenter Operations Management Suite, including SAN and storage, enabling them to quickly isolate problems and focus troubleshooting efforts on the right location. As a result, time-to-resolution of issues is reduced from days and hours, to minutes.”

At VMworld, the company will demonstrate the Brocade SAN Analytics Management Pack for vCenter Operations Management Suite in the Brocade booth (#1513) at the Moscone Convention Center. In addition, the company will present and discuss this new SAN functionality at a session titled “Health, Risk and Efficiency Assessment of SAN Infrastructure with vCenter Operations Manager,” which will be delivered on Wednesday, August 28 at 3:30 pm in Moscone West Room 3018.

Brocade Fabric Vision technology serves as the foundation to the Brocade SAN Analytics integration into vCenter Operations Management Suite. Brocade Fabric Vision technology delivers innovative diagnostic, monitoring, and management capabilities to maximize network uptime, simplify SAN management, and provide unprecedented visibility and insight across the storage network.

As the enabling technology for the Brocade SAN Analytics Management Pack, Brocade Fabric Vision features utilized for vCenter Operations Management Suite analytics are:
• Easy to use, policy-based threshold monitoring and alerting suite that proactively monitors the health and performance of the SAN infrastructure to help ensure application uptime and availability.
• Automated network traffic congestion detection in the fabric and correlation with hosts and applications impacted by a bottlenecked SAN port.

“Storage plays an important role in highly virtualized data centers,” said Ramin Sayar, senior vice president and general manager, Cloud Management, VMware. “With the Brocade SAN Analytics Management Pack for VMware vCenter™ Operations Management Suite, customers can benefit from visibility that extends into the storage subsystem, simplified management and rapid root cause detection, as well as optimal performance of workloads running in their virtual environments.”

vCenter Operations Management Suite applies patented analytics to integrated performance, capacity and configuration management for cloud infrastructure to deliver quality of service, operational efficiency and continuous compliance for dynamic hybrid cloud infrastructure and business critical applications.

Brocade Advances VCS Fabric Capabilities with Integrated Layer 2 Gateway for VMware NSX™

New Gateway Allows Customers to Bridge Virtual Workloads with Physical Resources to Provide a Seamless Transition to Cloud Architectures

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia; August 27, 2013 – Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced a new network virtualization gateway based on its industry-leading VCS® Fabric technology that enables customers to bridge logical networks with physical resources to provide a unified data center architecture.

Server virtualization adoption continues at a rapid pace. However, the majority of workloads, storage devices and network services remain in the physical environment. As customers look to deploy the VMware NSX™ network virtualization platform, they must be able connect the virtual network with the physical assets in the data center. To address this need, Brocade has collaborated with VMware to integrate VMware NSX with industry-leading Brocade® VCS Fabric technology to unify physical and virtual environments with the Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX™.

At VMworld®, the company will demonstrate the Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX in the Brocade booth (#1513) at the Moscone Convention Center. In addition, the company will discuss the gateway at a session titled “Advanced Network Designs for Data Center Transformation” today at 5:00 pm in Moscone West Room 2014.

The Brocade VDX® switch family, running VCS Fabric technology, serves as the foundation for the new gateway. This robust solution can be deployed as a single switch or as a highly resilient fabric of switches that deliver the industry’s best performance and availability.

“Today’s introduction of the Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX advances the capabilities of our VCS Fabric technology by unifying physical and virtualized resources within the data center,” said Jason Nolet, vice president, Data Center Networking, at Brocade. “The Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX provides our joint customers with an essential element for ensuring consistent and seamless connectivity between virtualized workloads and physical resources within the data center.”

“Our collaboration with Brocade has resulted in an integrated solution that can deliver an agile, scalable network infrastructure," said Hatem Naguib, vice president, cloud networking and security, at VMware. “Brocade and VMware are helping customers integrate physical and virtual networks that can be viewed and managed as a single unified infrastructure. This will help customers radically simplify IT through a new network operations model."

The Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX offers a number of benefits for seamless transition from legacy to cloud-based architectures, including:
• Gateway-level robustness allowing multiple Brocade VDX switches to be connected as one logical switch to support mission-critical applications and storage data
• A scalable, multitenant network virtualization environment
• Integrated VXLAN support within the Brocade VDX custom ASIC, delivering the highest-level gateway performance
• Conversion of tunnel connections into IP connections for bare metal servers running non-virtualized applications, physical storage devices or specialized hardware running network services

As a proof of this concept, Brocade is demonstrating the Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX with an EMC storage VNX series. “Brocade’s innovation in integrating VXLAN with VCS fabrics addresses a critical component for enterprises wanting to adopt VMware NSX network virtualization while needing continued connectivity to physical servers, as well as IP storage systems such as those offered by EMC.” said Paul Ross, vice president, Global Solutions, EMC Corporation. “The ability to integrate the physical storage environment with the virtual network will provide customers with an evolutionary migration to private and hybrid cloud infrastructures.”

Availability and Pricing
The Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX solution will be available in the fourth quarter of 2013. For pricing information, please contact Brocade at www.brocade.com.

Eager children learn how to use the Samsung GALAXY Camera as they prepare for their day of fun and excitement at KidZania

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.

Brocade Provides Foundation for Next Phase of Indonesia’s Internet Growth

Indonesian Internet Service Provider’s Association Zeroes in on Massive Scalability, Availability and 100 Gbps Capability of Brocade MLXe Series Core Routers 

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia. July 30, 2013 – Faced with the prospect of bandwidth demand increasing 10-fold in five years, Asosiasi Penyelenggara Jasa Internet Indonesia (APJII – the Indonesian Internet Service Providers Association) has deployed Brocade® MLXe-16 routers as the new core of the Indonesia Internet Exchange (IIX). These core routers will enable APJII to significantly scale IIX both in terms of aggregate throughput and individual connections with the Brocade MLXe platform capable of supporting 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE).

APJII currently has 161 peers and 278 members – including fixed and mobile telcos, Internet service providers and content providers – connecting to IIX through IPv4 while 51 of them also have IPv6 connections. At the end of 2012, Indonesia, with a population of 237.5 million, had 63 million Internet users. As of March 2013, the average Internet traffic running across IIX was 10 Gigabits per second, compared to about a quarter of that amount just two years earlier.

“There’s been a steep upswing in the rate of Internet traffic growth across the Indonesia Internet Exchange since 2010, driven by the increasing popularity of online gaming, music and video content, e-commerce, corporate VPNs and, of course, the use of smartphones,” said Harijanto Pribadi, Chief of IIX. “As a result, our existing core routing infrastructure was approaching capacity with no sign of traffic growth letting up anytime soon.

“A key issue is that about 60 percent of the Indonesian population uses mobile phones , but only a relatively small proportion of these users currently access the Internet from these handsets,” he added. “That’s obviously going to change rapidly. The nationwide build-out of 3G infrastructure is pretty much complete and 4G/LTE will start to be rolled out next year.”

In looking for a new core routing platform for IIX, Harijanto Pribadi, Chief of IIX, said the key criteria are very high availability and the ability to deliver high throughput with a high density of 1 and 10 GbE wire-speed connections in a single chassis. Going forward, APJII also anticipates the need to support 100 GbE connections for its largest members.

Built with a state-of-the-art, sixth-generation architecture and terabit-scale connectivity, the Brocade MLX® Series has a proven heritage with more than 10,000 routers deployed worldwide – including a healthy market share among Internet exchanges – to meet skyrocketing traffic requirements and reduce the cost-per-bit of routing data traffic.

Brocade MLXe-16 chassis with 7.68 Tbps of switching fabric capacity, each initially configured with 528 1 GbE ports and 16 10 GbE ports, have been deployed at the two IIX data centers. With plenty of spare capacity in the 16-slot chassis, APJII has the headroom to deploy four-port 40 GbE and two-port 100 GbE modules in the future.

While the two IIX core nodes are deployed at different sites for high-availability purposes, APJII plans to implement Brocade Multi-Chassis Trunking (MCT) technology to link the two routers to create a single logical device that dynamically load-balances traffic from service provider networks that have multiple connections to the IIX core.

“The Brocade MLXe core routers at IIX are designed from the ground up for non-stop networking, with an advanced redundant switch fabric architecture – complemented by hardware redundancy for the management modules, power supplies and cooling system – for very high availability,” said Charlie Foo, Asia Pacific Vice President of Brocade. “Brocade multi-chassis trunking capabilities will add active-active redundancy between the core nodes, giving the IIX network core very quick failover, load-balanced performance and highly efficient use of bandwidth. It’s really a best-of-all-worlds solution.”

Going forward, IIX’s operations will also be able to benefit from the ability of the Brocade MLXe-16 core routers to support software-defined networking (SDN) via the OpenFlow protocol. This opens up the possibility of applying SDN within the exchange to automatically make efficient routing decisions, detect policy conflicts and help troubleshoot routing problems.

World Vision International Supports Global Operations with Brocade Ethernet Fabric Solution

Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) Revamps Global Data Center to Reduce Cost Through Increased Virtualization, Streamlined Administration and a Smaller Equipment Footprint

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia. July 15, 2013 – Global Christian relief, development and advocacy organisation World Vision International has succeeded in cutting its data center network operating costs by 40 percent following the implementation of an Ethernet fabric-based network infrastructure from Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD) to support increased server virtualization. The deployment of Brocade® VDX® switches at a new hosted data center has enabled the Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) to reduce its network cost of ownership through streamlined administration, space savings and lower power consumption, while providing an open standard platform and a pathway to software-defined networking (SDN).

World Vision functions as a partnership of interdependent national offices in nearly 100 countries – bound together by a common mission and shared core values – running more than 2,500 projects that impact the lives of over 100 million people. Its Shared Services, Infrastructure Services and Service Center, based in Malaysia, supports 45,000 staff worldwide with systems for program management, sponsorship and donor management, financial management and a corporate intranet.

“World Vision is heavily dependent on IT as an enabler of activity, bringing transparency, accountability and transformation in the work that we do while reducing the ‘distance’ between the donor/sponsor, and the sponsored child,” said Nick Goh, Director of Service Centers – Global ICT, World Vision International. “Lowering the total cost of infrastructure ownership, while increasing its capability, enables us to free up more funds for World Vision’s ministry work and, at the same time, increase our operational effectiveness.”

With its existing data center network infrastructure approaching end-of-life and its hosting contract coming up for renewal, World Vision International had the opportunity to migrate its servers to a new state-of-the-art hosting facility while upgrading its network to be more scalable, flexible, cost-effective and standards-based.

“It was important for World Vision International, as the IT center for the organization, to evaluate the impact of technology change on cost reduction and the possibility of pay-as-you-grow scalability – in terms of a lower cost of technology acquisition, lowered maintenance costs and infrastructure that is operationally more efficient,” said Goh.

One of the NGO’s key objectives in upgrading its data center infrastructure was to increase the use of server virtualization. Brocade VCS® Fabric technology, based on open standards, offered a high level of virtual machine awareness and automation. In contrast, the solution proposed by other network vendors, although similar to some extent, was based on proprietary protocols.

“We went through a round of different proposals and made an evaluation from the top 3 network vendors. We selected Brocade Ethernet fabric technology for several reasons. It is designed for growth with the ability to interconnect up to 24 switches into a unified network fabric while their ports-on-demand license means we don’t have to pay for the full system capacity up front. It also meets our goal of having a flatter, more economical and manageable network based on open standards, which gives us investment security and also provides an onramp to software-defined networking,” said Goh.

Within World Vision International’s new data center, the Brocade VDX 6710 switches and VDX 6720 switches running VCS Fabric technology form a single, low-latency Ethernet fabric that supports more than 300 physical and virtual servers – along with 70 terabytes of data storage capacity. According to Goh, approximately 80 percent of the organization’s application servers have now been virtualized.

The flexibility and embedded intelligence of VCS Fabric technology support dynamic virtual machine mobility without network reconfiguration, and enable highly efficient and automated management of the entire fabric as a single logical switch. The elastic, self-healing capabilities of the fabric create a highly resilient foundation for World Vision International’s operations around the globe.

“Brocade is leading the industry with transformative innovations that overcome the complexity and limitations of traditional networks. Working closely with World Vision International has once again validated our foremost capacity in delivering a purpose-built network infrastructure for highly virtualized and cloud computing environments,” said Sean Ong, Brocade country manager for Malaysia. “We are excited to be working closely with World Vision International to not just address its network challenges today, but also to transform its network for decades ahead.”