Brocade has supplied VDX switches to assist Kawaguchi City, a municipality within the Greater Tokyo area, to increase the flexibility and agility of its information systems.
Kawaguchi City will be operating a single Ethernet fabric spanning all city offices. The new municipal network — being built around Ethernet fabrics based on Brocade VDX switches — will help Kawaguchi City to address new challenges, including the rollout of Japan’s My Number national identification system started in October 2015.
Kawaguchi City was one of the global cities to adopt open systems, SAN/LAN convergence, and server and network virtualization.
The Kawaguchi City will benefit from the next-generation network with a fabric architecture and support for software-defined networking protocols because its existing IP network infrastructure is approaching end of life, said the enterprise networking vendor.
“The proposal to deploy Brocade VDX switches to create a single Ethernet fabric spanning all city offices, which gave us a great deal of flexibility in the location of our information systems, was also the strongest in terms of technology, costs, and feasibility,” said Mizuho Ooyama, director of Information Policy Division, Kawaguchi City.
Brocade partner Net One Systems will install a pair of Brocade VDX 6740 switches in 22 Kawaguchi City locations, with a mesh of 40 Gbps Ethernet interconnections over the city’s own optical fiber cable infrastructure, combined with Brocade VCS Fabric technology to form a logical chassis that can be managed as a single switch.
A highly resilient municipal network, featuring low-latency connections between 10 Gbps Ethernet access ports across fabric will be the main benefit.
The Kawaguchi City administration plans to use its new fabric network to mirror data and relocate information systems to other municipal offices, leveraging the automated intelligence of Brocade VCS Fabric technology to ensure the migration is invisible to end users.