Brocade lays out plans for virtualised cloud and IPv6 future

Brocade has been hosting a technology showcase in San Jose to demonstrate the opportunities for cloud service providers to move into the application management sphere.

Dave Stevens, Brocade's chief technology officer, told attendees at the company's Technology Day Summit that the industry is at a crucial point. Total data storage will reach 35 zetabytes by 2020, and over 22 billion internet-enabled devices will be online.

At the same time the cost of broadband and fibre connections is falling and the growth of virtualisation is surpassing the current installed base.

Stevens explained that Brocade is supporting the virtualised enterprise, which will level the playing field between IT departments.

"The virtual enterprise is here. It's the most efficient way to run an IT infrastructure," he said during a keynote.

"We're entering an environment where WAN bandwidth and compute ability is sufficient to build a mixed IT infrastructure that is effectively seamless for users. It's the democratisation of IT; anyone can play in that environment."

To support the new market position Brocade is releasing networking hardware and software based around fabric integration with the cloud. This will allow easy transitioning of virtual machines between computing centres, and better WAN and network software control systems.

By reconfiguring their networks, cloud service providers could take the next step to becoming application vendors, which will open up major new revenue streams, according to Ken Cheng, vice president and general manager of Brocade's IP products division.

"Communications service providers can't just deliver pipes any more, they have to look for new revenue opportunities," he said.

On the hardware side Brocade announced 16Gbit/s fibre channel hardware including the DCX 8510 Backbone, the 6510 Switch, the 1860 Fabric Adapter and Network Advisor 11.1 management software, all running on the Fabric 7.0 operating system and available by the second half of the year.

The hardware comes with built-in encryption, in-flight data compression and a new set of management and network optimisation controls augmented by software designed to automatically allocate resources and ease the load on network administrators.

Speed is also essential, Cheng said, and the high cost of 100GB optical connections is holding the market back.

Brocade, Google, JDS Uniphase and others are developing cheap optical connections based on the 10x10 MSA standard to fix this bottleneck and boost the market.

Brocade also plans to introduce products allowing companies to transition from IPv4 traffic to IPv6.

Keith Stewart, director of product management at Brocade, warned that the market is too polarised between fundamentalists who want to upgrade to the new addressing system, and the complacent who feel things are fine.

Both sides are wrong, he argued. Companies need a flexible approach that allows support for existing IPv4 services, while adding the ability to support IPv6-only enterprises and inputs.

"Customers continue to trust their networks to Brocade as they move to highly virtualised environments and cloud models," said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president of global enterprise and consumer research at analyst firm Yankee Group.

"Brocade offers a comprehensive networking portfolio that is purpose built for virtualisation and clouds, leveraging proven technologies such as fibre channel and emerging technologies such as standards-based Ethernet fabrics."