Brocade ties up with Micromax over Ethernet Fabric Technology

Micromax Informatics has deployed innovative Brocade Ethernet fabric technology in a new virtualized data center designed to support the next several years of operational growth.

Although little known outside of its home region, Micromax is already the world’s tenth-largest mobile handset maker, shipping more than 3 million mobile handsets a month, of which about a third are smartphones. While international revenues are still less than 10 per cent of its total income, the company is aiming to increase this to 50 per cent in five years. A next-generation data center to support warehouse and factory operations as well as a Micromax call center—which has ballooned from 50 seats to 200 seats in the last three years  is an important element in the Micromax expansion plans.

“Given the pace at which we have been growing, and the challenges of establishing a strong presence in new markets, building a data center that is both scalable and flexible is a crucial development. While data center virtualization was obviously the path to follow, our biggest issue was finding a network infrastructure that would enable a high level of operational automation while having the flexibility to accommodate rapid data center evolution,” said Atul Nigam, CIO, Micromax Informatics Ltd.

The company ultimately selected low-latency Brocade VDX 6740 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) switches as the network foundation of the new data center due to the strength of Brocade VCS Fabric technology, ease of configuration, operational automation, and cost-effective performance and scalability. Brocade ADX application delivery switches have also been deployed in the new Micromax data center to accelerate application performance, increase application availability, and improve security.

“The combination of pay-as-you-grow scalability, low operating cost, and advanced network virtualization features make Brocade VDX switches an excellent choice for cloud data centers such as the one Micromax is developing. Compared to conventional data center switching architecture, Brocade VCS Fabric technology is vastly more elastic, scalable, and efficient at dealing with virtual machine mobility and massive levels of east/west inter-server traffic,” said Edgar Dias, Regional Director, Brocade India.

Micromax is starting with approximately 40 Virtual Machines (VMs) running on four racks of blade servers and Micromax expects this will scale up to 100 VMs and 10 server racks within a year. The Brocade VDX 6740 switches have been deployed with an initial 24 fiber ports enabled and, as more server connections are needed, Micromax can license additional 8-port increments up to a maximum of 64 per switch.