Brocade surpasses 1,100 VCS Fabric customers worldwide

This Ethernet fabric solution was selected primarily for its reliability, flexibility and virtualization capabilities. Two years ago Brocade launched the industry’s first Ethernet fabric switching solutions, which are purpose-built to support highly virtualized and cloud-optimized data centers. Now, with more than 1,100 customer installations—including more than 150 in the last quarter alone—Brocade and its customers have achieved a major milestone in the adoption of this proven technology designed to meet the unique challenges of the modern data center.

SunGard Public Sector is now able to use a multivendor network that includes Brocade VDX Switches running Brocade VCS Fabric technology along with a Brocade DCX® Backbone in its data center. This data center provides services to city and county governments, public safety and justice agencies, and non-profit organizations.

“Brocade VDX switches enable us to provide our customers with unparalleled support. We were looking for the next-generation architecture to support our highly virtualized environment, and ultimately chose Brocade over the incumbent for its ease of use and automation benefits. SunGard supports local governments and public safety and justice agencies, and helps these organizations produce tangible results, so it is critical that our networks work without disruption delivering high reliability with the lowest latency possible,” said Charles Almy, senior director, information services at SunGard Public Sector.

Brocade recently revealed its vision for The On-Demand Data Center™, which includes a multifaceted data center portfolio strategy to address both current and future requirements for the modern data center. A key component of this strategy is the Brocade VDX switch family and Brocade VCS Fabric technology, which provide the highly automated network foundation required to deliver new services and applications at the speed of business.
Compared to other parts of the IT sector, there has been little data center network innovation in the last 20 years, leaving customers with outdated hardware and software that was designed for client-server computing architectures, not today’s highly virtualized cloud computing environments. As a result, network architectures must evolve in a highly reliable, automated and cost-effective way to support this paradigm shift in the data center.
According to Gartner[1], “Automation in the data center has had a major impact on data center operations and expectations are that the network will become part of a more coordinated virtual architecture. More recently, we have seen rapidly increasing interest in exploiting the broad network virtualization capabilities and open interfaces delivered with software-defined networking (SDN) solutions. Moving away from 40-year-old network operations interfaces is arguably the biggest transformational benefit when looking to modernize a data center network architecture.”

Due to these emerging data center networking trends, Brocade has experienced accelerated demand for its proven VCS Fabric technology, resulting in more than 250,000 Brocade VDX Switch ports deployed in production data center environments around the world.

“We are excited to see so many customers now benefiting from the vision and innovative technology that Brocade has delivered to help customers gain a competitive advantage in this era of data center virtualization and cloud architectures,” said Jason Nolet, vice president, Data Center Networking, Brocade. “The vision we share with our customers is to enable ‘The On-Demand Data Center’ and the Brocade VDX switch family with VCS Fabric technology play a key role in delivering the new levels of automation, efficiency and agility that are critical to realizing this vision. We are seeing accelerating adoption of our solutions with more than 1,100 customers across enterprise, service provider and hybrid cloud data centers segments.”

The global leader in data center fabric innovation and deployment, Brocade leads the industry in the development and delivery of Ethernet fabrics. With this key milestone, Brocade has more Ethernet fabric customers than any other vendor offering Ethernet fabric solutions. These customers span several industries, including technology vendors, cloud service providers, governments and healthcare providers.

According to IDC[2], “Enterprises seeking to optimize the investments they make in virtualization and cloud technologies should consider migrating to an Ethernet fabric. IDC believes that by migrating to an Ethernet fabric in their data centers, network managers can reduce infrastructure complexity, increase IT flexibility, and improve workload mobility, enabling private clouds.”