Brocade delivers first On-Demand data center

Continuing its support for the OpenStack initiative and its commitment to bringing open network solutions to enterprise and service provider customers, Brocade has come up with VCS fabric plugin that delivers powerful on-demand fabric provisioning capabilities in OpenStack-based cloud environments.

Available as a component of the OpenStack Grizzly release, the new offering expands the native attributes of Brocade VCS Fabric technology -- unsurpassed network automation, efficiency and elasticity -- by coupling these benefits with the ease of provisioning provided by OpenStack. This will allow customers to deploy network capacity and services in their cloud-based data centers far more quickly than with legacy network architectures and provisioning tools.

This solution is an essential component of the Brocade 'On-Demand Data Center' strategy, a comprehensive approach that depends upon highly automated and scalable network architecture.

"The benefit of deploying a private or public cloud built on OpenStack is that it gives the customer the utmost level of flexibility and control when provisioning essential components within an open cloud architecture. The inclusion of Brocade as a part of the Rackspace Private Cloud reference architecture addresses the desire of our customers to have choice in their distributions," said John Igoe, VP, Rackspace Private Cloud.

"Innovative companies like Brocade, who are committed to supporting open initiatives, enable customers to fully capitalize on their IT investments without risk of vendor or technology lock-in associated with proprietary platforms," he added.

Brocade's "On-Demand Data Center" strategy represents another major evolution in networking toward a highly virtualized, open and flexible network infrastructure. With an infrastructure that combines physical and virtual networking elements, customers can provision the capacity - compute, network, storage and services - required to deliver high-value applications faster and easier compared to legacy data center networks.

This strategy also represents another logical step on the path toward mass customer adoption of Software-Defined Networking (SDN).

"Brocade's On-Demand Data Center strategy provides a resilient and complete blueprint that unifies vital areas of the data center, from Fabrics to storage to physical and virtual infrastructure. Additionally, this strategy provides a pragmatic route for the adoption of emerging Software-Defined Networking technologies," said Zeus Kerravala, founder and principal analyst with ZK Research.