Infotech Lead’s interaction with Edgar Dias, regional director, Brocade Communications, on the latest trends in storage and networking.
What are your tips and solutions to enterprise CIOs to improve RoI from networking solutions?
In today’s challenging environment, some of the key imperatives for enterprise CIO’s are : A) Reduce Cost and Consolidate; B) Drive to eliminate complexity in network deployments; C)Accelerate the availability and deployment of new applications and most importantly; D) a transition to service orientation where IT is delivering key services to the business.
The data center is a critical piece of infrastructure and at times CIO’s are struggling to provide evidence to the business that investments in IT are delivering ROI and competitive advantage. The general thinking is that if IT is a cost, then you want to reduce it.
Brocade’s vision is to deliver network infrastructure that provides incredible levels of simplification and automation over legacy networking architectures, thus providing dramatic improvements in network efficiency, utilization and application performance; while providing headroom to massively handle increasing traffic without needing to rip and replace. This new paradigm provides unparalleled agility to deploy network services in physical or virtual form factors in ways never before possible.
A classic example of this is Brocade’s Ethernet Fabrics technology; which are deployed across 1400+ customers worldwide. This innovative technology not only provides standards based convergence capabilities; but provides unmatched simplicity in hyper-virtualized cloud architectures; as well as higher throughput and lower latency in a scale-out network architecture that is in demand in today’s environment.
Another trend that is increasingly taking shape is the virtualization of network functions (NFV) whereby network functions which were earlier associated with “proprietary appliances” will now be extracted and can be deployed as virtual machines on COTS (common of the shelf) servers. The impact of this on overall ROI is expected to be profound as not only will it reduce costs but it rapidly increases time to market for adding newer services. Here too, Brocade is leading the way with its Vyatta vRouter 5600 portfolio.
What are your latest offerings?
Brocade is driving technology disruption in 2 key segments: Campus and the Data Center
On the Campus side, coupled with the innovative functionality that HyperEdge brings to simplify the management of large campus networks, Brocade has recently launched the industry’s first purpose built network switch for Scale-out Campus network. The latest Brocade ICX 7750 delivers unprecedented 10G/40G densities while racking up until now unheard of throughput capabilities of upto 82Tbps and upto 46,000 Million packets per second of forwarding capacity.
On the Data center side, the continuous innovation that Brocade is delivering in Ethernet Fabrics coupled with a comprehensive SDN (Software Defined Networking) strategy that spans the portfolio has been well received by industry and analysts. When combined with the powerful capabilities of Network Function Virtualization delivered by Vyatta vRouter 5600, the Brocade architecture delivers outstanding value and significant differentiation for Enterprise as well as Service Provider customers.
What are your strategies to increase market share in networking space?
Brocade has been delivering world class solutions to Enterprise and Service Provider customers by its state-of-the-art Data Center products. While the Data Center becomes the critical component for CIO’s globally, Brocade’s asymmetric bet on data center networking has shown to pay rich dividends.
On the Fiber Channel SAN side, Brocade has been the innovator and leader and the 16Gbps Fifth Generation (Gen-5) technology is become the defacto standard for customers deploying hyper-virtualization, public/hybrid clouds and flash storage architectures. The SAN market continues to represent an exciting opportunity for Brocade as customers are upgrading their infrastructure to Gen-5.
As Software Defined Networking (SDN) takes hold, Brocade’s bet in 2010 on Ethernet fabrics is becoming the central theme around which most data center transformation architectures are based. This is due to its incredible simplicity while being able to scale out across multiple racks, yet manage the entire entity as a “logical switch”. Another big part of the strategy which will be an industry-disrupter is Vyatta virtual router which can now run upto 10Gbps on one processor core! This has been described as the holy grail for being able to architect a truly “software defined data center” where compute, networking, storage and security can be scaled, accessed and manipulated using API’s.
Brocade’s strategy is to couple this innovative technology with a strong ecosystem of channel partners who are trained and certified and capable of deploying this technology while reducing operational complexity and cost for our customers.
Which are your targeted industry verticals?
Brocade’s products have applicability in the segments of Enterprise and Service Provider. In India, the focus remains on gaining market share in the IT/ITeS, Public Sector and the Financials segment; while consolidating the numerous wins in the Education vertical.
What are the challenges in networking space?
Some of them are:
A) Continue to deliver superior value to customers so that they can leverage IT to drive differentiation between them and their competition.
B) In the infrastructure space, it’s fashionable for all companies to call themselves “software defined” often when the stark reality is that they are re-positioning an old product. The challenge is to be able for the channel and its sales force to be able to articulate this highly technical value proposition of Brocade’s products though in simpler and easy to understand means.
C) Be able to capitalize on the transformation of data center networks in large enterprise and service providers and gain a disproportionate share of references for Brocade.
Rajani Baburajan
