Brocade has announced true Ethernet fabric switching solutions that are purpose-built for highly virtualized and cloud-optimized data centres. The Brocade VDX 6720 data centre switches are a new family of 10 Gigabit Ethernet offerings that revolutionize layer 2 Ethernet networking.
The switches eliminate the need for Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), collapsing the access and aggregation networking layers to create a flat, multi-path, deterministic network that is ideal for virtualized environments. This approach provides virtual machines (VMs) a greater sphere of mobility, increases network utilization, creates more resilient networks and simplifies the management of data centre networks.
"Over half of all IT workloads will run on virtual machines by the end of this year, with that number climbing to beyond 70 per cent by the end of 2013. Brocade has architected a flat, high-performance and highly scalable data centre network solution that promises to help their customers scale their virtual environments," said, Cindy Borovick, Vice- President, Enterprise Communications Infrastructure and Data Centre Networks at IDC.
The Brocade VDX 6720 Data Centre Switches are available in one- or two-rack-unit (1U or 2U) form factors and provide the ability to scale from 16 to 60 ports with pay-as-you-grow ports on demand licensing. The switches provide full 10 gigabite per second wire-speed performance from any port to any port, with latency of 600 nanoseconds.
