Brocade said its IP networking solution has supported China Pharmaceutical University (CPU) to consolidate multiple server farms into a single cloud data center.
The new data center will enable the Chinese university to strengthen its pharmacological research and accelerate application delivery while reducing operating costs.
CPU will be using data center virtualization to provide efficient infrastructure that supports academic and administrative needs from a unified data center that includes a high-performance computing platform, said Brocade.
“It no longer makes sense to have decentralized server and data storage facilities — with all the duplication and limitations — especially as computer modelling has become such an important technique in pharmacological research,” said Yuan Quan, deputy director of information technology center of China Pharmaceutical University.
CPU has leveraged Brocade VCS Fabric technology within the data center to establish a seamless Ethernet fabric, integrated with its virtualized server and storage infrastructure, while using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to support Virtual Machine (VM) security and load balancing.
The university has slashed operating costs while providing a far more capable platform to power its academic and administrative applications compared to operating its previous, decentralized server farms.
CPU has invested in Brocade VDX 8770 and VDX 6740 switches to deliver 10 Gigabit ports with low-latency port-to-port performance to ensure better cloud computing operations.
The self-forming, self-healing fabric supports VM mobility between hypervisor hosts. Brocade VDX switches provide a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) gateway, enabling VM hosts to access the university’s EMC VPLEX virtual storage cluster without the need for SAN interfaces.
CPU has deployed the Brocade vRouter within the data center to provide VM security while Brocade Virtual ADX application delivery controller handles server load balancing and security at the application level. Brocade NFV software run on the same standardized virtual server infrastructure as CPU’s applications, enabling the university to scale capacity.
