FROM DATA CENTRE TO THE WAN
DON SAMBANDARAKSA
Deb Dutta: new footprint |
Brocade has taken a bold step into the networking industry with the agreed $3 billion acquisition of Foundry, giving it a footprint beyond the data centre, into the LAN, WAN and layer 3 to layer 7 spaces, as well as in network security.
Brocade's vice-president for Asia-Pacific and Japan Deb Dutta explained that traditionally, Brocade had been the market leader in SAN (storage area network) switches, with over 17 million SAN ports and 44,000 directors (switch-controllers) installed.
With the launch of its DCX network backbone earlier this year, Brocade moved beyond storage and into data centre switching beyond just storage switches and into data centre server to server space. The Foundry acquisition is a further step outside the data centre.
"We were in the data centre only as Brocade and could not go outside it. With Foundry, the integration allows us to enter into the Internet world," he said, saying that the enterprise and telco space was within his sights.
The fastest growing area in the data centre is blade servers, and today Brocade provides embedded SAN switches for all the major blade server manufacturers, including HP, IBM, Hitachi, Fujitsu, Huawei and Dell.
He said that by operating at all levels, Brocade can ensure a guaranteed data corridor from the application right through to the SAN cloud for a new generation of services. This allows IT to focus on developing applications while Brocade takes care of the network.
The trend for virtualisation has helped, and Dutta emphasises that virtualisation of servers is practically impossible unless the data centre has a SAN to pool storage and manage data in place first.
In the past, it was only "tier 1" enterprise applications that were connected to the SAN, but with more servers being virtualised, many more servers are now connected to a lot more storage, growing the market significantly.
Despite the rise of cheaper alternatives, Brocade expects fibre channel to be the predominant standard for SAN switches, at least until 2014. Brocade was first to 2Gbps and 4Gbps fibre channel and has just launched an 8Gbps line-up with 16Gbps currently in standards finalisation.
That said, Dutta spoke of the new Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) protocol that allows for much simpler networks in the data centre. This means fibre channel protocols over IP packets. Recent advances in latency and speed have made Ethernet a viable low-latency substitute for what fibre-channel is doing today.
However, this requires a more robust transport layer, as dropped packets on the web is one thing, but a couple of lost packets in a storage array can be catastrophic.
Brocade is working towards the Converged Enhanced Ethernet standard, an open standard, along with 16 other organisations. Dutta was quick to point out that Cisco's Data Centre Ethernet was aiming to accomplish the same thing, but was strictly a proprietary Cisco initiative.
Dutta also said that Brocade's services and support division now makes up 15 per cent of worldwide revenue. Brocade has consultants that help plan and actually implement new technology, sometimes "going into the trenches" with them and sorting out difficult data centre operational problems.
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