Brocade announces suite of agile data centre products

Brocade’s new portfolio of data center products is designed to get networks up an running quickly and  smoothly. It believes organisations need this agility to meet with the demands of digital transformation.

“Organisations that are going through digital transformation need networks that are extremely agile, extensively automated and highly visible,” said CK Lam, Brocade’s Director, Data Center Fabric and Virtualization for Asia Pacific.  “Brocade is delivering the breadth and depth of flexibility and agility that sets us apart from other network providers. We do so vertically across the data centre stack, and horizontally across domains within the data centre—while being open at every layer.”

CK Lam

The portfolio of products features an expanded Brocade SLX family of innovative switches and the Brocade Workflow Composer Automation Suites for turnkey automation. With Brocade, organisations can build networks that allow them to quickly adapt to technology transitions, deliver new services at cloud speed and accelerate digital transformation.

The new switches include the Brocade SLX 9140, SLX 9240 and SLX 9540 data centre switches for the leaf, spine and edge respectively. It also comes embedded with the Brocade SLX Insight Architecture to enable pervasive visibility throughout the network to quickly identify problems, accelerate meantime to remediation and improve overall service levels. The Brocade SLX 9140 and 9240 extend these capabilities with a programmable ASIC that provides Visibility Services from the physical wire to virtual networks and workloads.

The new Brocade automation suites includes Network Essentials, Data Center Fabrics and Internet Exchange Points for the Brocade Workflow Composer platform. It provides users with automated network provisioning, validation, troubleshooting and remediation workflows. These automation suites are ideal for customers who want to jumpstart their automation journey with prebuilt workflows to accelerate time to value.  Introduced earlier this year, Brocade Workflow Composer is a server based, DevOps style network automation platform that integrates across IT domains for end to end workflow automation.

Brocade also has a DevOps support team on hand to provide customisation if needed. Lam said that the team members work in house with the customer for more complex requirements, while simpler requirements might be handled remotely. Brocade’s DevOps support teams are  based in Australia and China.

Brocade SLX Family Advancements

The new Brocade SLX 9140 leaf switch provides 48×25 GbE server-facing ports and 6×100 GbE ports in a 1U fixed form factor. It also features flexible 1/10/25/40/100 GbE configuration options.

The new Brocade SLX 9240 spine switch delivers 32×100 GbE ports in a 1U fixed form factor.

Both the Brocade SLX 9140 and SLX 9240 switches features programmable ASIC in their class of switch enabling Brocade to rapidly deliver new capabilities via software.  This eliminates expensive upgrades for customers when new technologies and protocols are introduced into the environment. The ASIC builds on the Brocade SLX Insight Architecture, an open kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) environment to run third party and customer specific monitoring, troubleshooting and analytics applications, by adding Visibility Services to provide insight into virtual networks and workloads. Actions can be taken within the switch or through applications and tools outside of the switch, such as Splunk or Brocade Workflow Composer.

The Brocade SLX 9540 switch delivers carrier-class features in a cost-effective 1 RU fixed form factor optimised for data centre interconnect, WAN edge and Internet exchange point deployments. It offers 48×10 GbE ports and 6×100 GbE ports.

Brocade Workflow Composer Automation Suites

Designed to run with the Brocade Workflow Composer platform, Brocade automation suites are ideal for IT organisations seeking to embrace automation but have limited automation development skills and resources.  The suites provide out of box network lifecycle automation for commonly performed tasks and are packaged to address major use cases. Each automation suite includes documentation and a collection of turnkey, yet customisable workflows, services, sensors, actions, and rules.  Customers can use Brocade automation suites as is or as starter kits for building or customising workflows specific to their data centre requirements to reduce time to value.

All switches will be available in April 2017. Brocade Workflow Composer is available today and the new automation suites will be available for preview in December 2016 with general availability planned for February 2017.