Collaboration Enables Customers to Build Highly Scalable, Programmable Networks and Foster Rapid Innovation and Deployment of Services

Brocade® (NASDAQ: BRCD) and NEC Corporation of America (NEC) today announced an expanded collaboration to bring to market combined solutions around Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and OpenFlow switching, including network virtualisation.

Brocade and NEC will jointly market solutions for network virtualisation, large-scale data centre infrastructure management, traffic engineering and Wide Area Network (WAN) flow management, with an open standards-based approach. Brocade and NEC will market these high-value solutions built around Brocade's OpenFlow-enabled products and NEC's award-winning Programmable Flow Controller.

As part of the collaboration, Brocade and NEC are committing to ongoing certification, interoperability and solution validation testing. To this end, Brocade and NEC will establish joint solution labs in key regional offices to test and demonstrate their solutions. The current Brocade and NEC OpenFlow-enabled products successfully completed interoperability testing in 2011.

Brocade and NEC are collaborating on technology and implementation alignment, including OpenFlow standards, tunnel technology and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to help ensure ongoing innovation and seamless deployment by joint customers.

Brocade and NEC recently demonstrated their technology and joint solutions at the Open Networking Summit 2012 in Santa Clara, California and Interop, Las Vegas. Additional demonstrations are planned for upcoming industry events, including Interop Tokyo (June 13 to 15, 2012).

"The combined NEC and Brocade SDN solutions will give customers the ability to design, deploy, monitor and manage secure, multi-tenant networks from a single point of control," said Mitsuhiro Murooka, Vice President, NEC Enterprise Technologies IT. "Brocade and NEC customers will be able to achieve greater service agility, granular traffic control and significant productivity gains by adopting a software-defined network architecture."

"Through standards-based solutions like OpenFlow, the SDN and underlying network can be coupled to optimise service performance and cost. A key objective for Verizon is to virtualise the network and converge the orchestration of the virtualised networks with VMs in the data centres to create a true cloud," said Stuart Elby, vice president, network architecture and technology, Verizon, and founding board member of Open Networking Foundation (ONF).

"Stronger definition of network behavior in software is a growing trend, and open interfaces are going to lead to faster innovation," said Dan Pitt, executive director, Open Networking Foundation. "We are excited to be joined by leading global companies to help develop and implement advanced networking capabilities for today's operators and enterprises."

"SDN enables network operators to rapidly deploy innovative services and access powerful analytics through programmatic control, unlocking the intelligence of their data centre and wide area networks," said Ken Cheng, vice president and general manager, service provider business, Brocade. "Our collaboration with NEC ensures we deliver high-value solutions that can be seamlessly deployed in our customers' networks to realise the benefit of SDN."

Software-Defined Networking and OpenFlow Solutions
In June 2010, Brocade was one of the first major networking vendors to publicly endorse OpenFlow, which is a major component of a new approach to networking called SDN. SDN involves several components, including standards-based OpenFlow, which delivers to service providers and network operators granular control of their network infrastructures. Brocade delivers OpenFlow capabilities across its high-performance switching and routing products, enabling flow control up to 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) speeds. With its partners, Brocade builds compelling cloud networking solutions for service providers and network operators worldwide. These solutions alleviate the burden of operational complexity for customers that are building and managing hyper-scale cloud infrastructures.