Depositphotos_10052185_original

Modern infrastructure for a digital era

Recognising that the network is crucial basis for digital transformation that is scalable, is strong motivation for networking solutions vendor Brocade, to build the SLX 9850 routing solution.

Director of Data Centre and Virtualisation, CK Lam, even dubbed it the routing solution for the digital era.

The SLX 9850 provides industry-leading density, scale and performance for 10/40/100GbE data centre use cases.  It also has embedded Brocade SLX Insight Architecture for pervasive network visibility and is able to leverage the Brocade Workflow Composer (BWC) that delivers DevOps-type network automation and workflow automation across different domains like server, network, operations, applications and so on.

All three together is proving to be a powerful combination.

CK Lam

CK Lam

 

BWC which launched a few months ago, will actually automatically provision hardware, troubleshoot and validate network configurations, while being integrated with different pieces of the platform, like PagerDuty.

Lam enthusiastically pointed out that BWC has integration with the Slack chatbot, effectively extending the solution’s function to configuration of physical infrastructure as well.

He explained, “With so much abstraction of hardware from software, the days of command lines are over. Apps and services can demand resources direct from the network now.”

And now, there is also an analytics portion.

Lam shared, “There is demand for analytics already. IT admins would put probes and taps along the route of traffic flow, but with (Brocade) Insight at the core, it is the most suitable point for an analytics engine to be.

“As I move around the region, more and more customers want visibility into the network, to be able to provide service level agreements (SLA) and personalised services,” Lam said.

The analytics advantage

Nobody provides full analytics end-to-end in the first place,” Lam observed. Now with their own analytics architecture, Brocade works with data analytics providers like Splunk and Data Dog, to integrate their solutions onto the Brocade platform.

“The platform makes it easier to collect data without disrupting the network,” he pointed out.

It includes an open kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) environment to run third-party and customer-specific monitoring, troubleshooting and analytics applications. There is also a dedicated 10 GbE analytics path between the packet processor on each router unit’s interface module and the KVM environment.

This allows applications running in the KVM environment to extract data via an internal, isolated link without disrupting the forwarding or control plane traffic.

Gartner forecasts that there will be 6.4 billion connected things this year, an increase of 30-percent from last year. This figure is expected to reach 20.8 billion come 2020 and in 2021, video will account for about 70-percent of mobile data traffic.

 

 




There are no comments

Add yours