Brocade announced a new network virtualization gateway for bridging logical networks with physical resources using the VMware NSX network virtualization platform in order to provide a unified data center. The gateway involves the integration of VMware NSX with Brocade’s VCS Fabric technology.
The Brocade VDX switch family, running VCS Fabric technology, serves as the foundation for the new gateway. It can be deployed as a single switch or as a highly resilient fabric of switches, such as for connecting mission-critical applications and storage data. Tunnel connections are translated into IP connections for bare metal servers running non-virtualized applications, physical storage devices or specialized hardware running network services. VXLAN support is integrated within the Brocade VDX custom ASIC, enabling high gateway performance.
“Today’s introduction of the Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX advances the capabilities of our VCS Fabric technology by unifying physical and virtualized resources within the data center,” said Jason Nolet, vice president, Data Center Networking, at Brocade. “The Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX provides our joint customers with an essential element for ensuring consistent and seamless connectivity between virtualized workloads and physical resources within the data center.”
“Our collaboration with Brocade has resulted in an integrated solution that can deliver an agile, scalable network infrastructure,” said Hatem Naguib, vice president, cloud networking and security, at VMware. “Brocade and VMware are helping customers integrate physical and virtual networks that can be viewed and managed as a single unified infrastructure. This will help customers radically simplify IT through a new network operations model.”
Brocade anticipates launching its VCS Gateway for VMware NSX in Q4 2013.
In September 2012, Brocade has expanded its set of VDX fabric switches for the data center with a new VDX 8770 model designed for enterprises and service providers striving to both simplify and scale-out their data center infrastructure.
The modular Brocade VDX 8770 Switch is built to support the largest data centers with highly virtualized environments. The Ethernet fabric enables faster virtual machine (VM) migrations through zero-touch VM discovery, VM mobility and VM port configuration migration. Using VCS fabrics, Brocade said its customers can manage dozens of switches as a single logical device. New switches will self-provision when they are connected to the fabric.
The Brocade VDX 8770 enables a single VCS fabric to scale up to 8000 switch ports with up to 384,000 VMs attached to the fabric. This is 20 times the scalability of the leading competitor, according to Brocade. The Brocade VDX 8770 also delivers the industry’s lowest port-to-port latency at 3.5 microseconds across all 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE), 10 GbE and 40 GbE ports — half the latency of the nearest competitor.
The Brocade VDX 8770 is built with a 4 Tbps backplane, enabling the chassis to support future technologies such as dense 100 GbE. Brocade said the VDX 8770 is also engineered for emerging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architectures, with flexible hardware support for network virtualization through technologies such as VXLAN overlay networking.
