Powerful New Modular Switch Delivers Unmatched Scale, Performance and Automation for Private and Public Cloud Networks

Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD), the industry leader in fabric networking, today announced a revolutionary switching platform, the Brocade® VDX® 8770 Switch, along with VCS® Fabric technology enhancements that take data centre network simplicity, efficiency and resiliency to a new scale. The Brocade VDX 8770 is designed for enterprises and service providers striving to both simplify and scale-out their data centre infrastructure in order to accelerate new service introduction and drive innovation, while also lowering costs.

With more than 700 customers who have already installed Brocade VDX switches, Brocade is building on the success of its VCS fabric-enabled switch portfolio with the addition of the modular Brocade VDX 8770 Switch. The newest family member is built to support the largest data centres, delivering unprecedented simplicity and automation along with massive scalability and performance—all while offering superior investment protection.

Simplicity and Automation
The Brocade VDX 8770 and VCS Fabric technology deliver a radically simplified data centre network. Designed specifically for highly virtualised environments, Ethernet fabrics built on VCS Fabric technology accelerate application deployment and enable faster virtual machine (VM) migrations through zero -touch VM discovery, VM mobility and VM port configuration migration. Using VCS fabrics, customers can manage dozens of switches as a single logical device, dramatically reducing operational costs. They can also save installation time as new switches self-provision when they are connected to the fabric.

Scale and Performance
With today’s virtualised and cloud-centric data centre architectures, application performance is highly dependent on the efficiency and utilisation of the network infrastructure. VM density per server is also rapidly increasing as customers seek to maximise server utilisation. To support these requirements, they need a high-performance network that can scale out on demand to address immediate business needs.

The Brocade VDX 8770 provides unprecedented fabric scalability for the world’s largest data center environments, enabling customers to expand a single VCS fabric up to 8000 switch ports with up to 384,000 VMs attached to the fabric—20 times the scalability of the leading competitor. Designed for today’s real-time applications, 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.

Moreover, the Brocade VDX 8770 sets a new standard for network efficiency and fault-tolerance with improved scalability and load balancing of Layer 3 gateways in the fabric. Combining this Layer 3 innovation with VCS fabric trunking and TRILL-based Layer 2 ECMP, customers can realise significantly improved network resiliency and superior application performance by maximising available network bandwidth.

State-of-the-Art Design for the Future
The Brocade VDX 8770 is specifically built to address the evolving needs of tomorrow’s data centres and to support the latest technologies. With an industry-leading 4 Tbps backplane, the Brocade VDX 8770 chassis is designed to support future technologies such as dense 100 GbE, providing ample performance capacity for years to come. The Brocade VDX 8770 is also engineered for emerging Software-Defined Networking (SDN) architectures, with flexible hardware support for network virtualisation through technologies such as VXLAN overlay networking.

Continued Leadership in Ethernet Fabrics
In 2010, Brocade began articulating a vision for transforming networking to support the next-generation cloud-optimised data centre. Later that year, Brocade delivered on the first phase of this vision by pioneering the Ethernet fabric category with the introduction of Brocade VCS Fabric technology and the Brocade VDX 6720 VCS-enabled switch. In 2011, Brocade delivered on the second phase of its vision by expanding the Brocade VDX family with the Brocade VDX 6710 and 6730 switches. Continuing the revolution of the data centre networking and Ethernet fabric category, the introduction of the Brocade VDX 8770 represents the third phase of Brocade’s vision. This vision focuses on helping the largest-scale data centres utilise VCS fabrics that deliver superior automation, resiliency and efficiency to support the most advanced private and public cloud environments.

Pricing and Availability
The Brocade VDX 8770 is orderable now. U.S. list price starts at $65,000 ($833/10G port). The Brocade VDX 8770 and other Brocade networking solutions are available direct, through Brocade channel partners and via Brocade Network Subscription.

Additional Resources

    Event – Register to view sessions from Brocade Analyst and Technology Day 2012 (www.brocade.com/analystandtechnologyday)

    Video - Jason Nolet, vice president, Brocade  (http://www.brocade.com/fabricarchitecture)

    Additional News Today: Brocade MLXe Core Routers Take Leadership Position with Highest 10 GbE Density in the Industry (http://newsroom.brocade.com)

    Customer videos (http://www.brocade.com/fabricarchitecture)

    Images: Flickr Page: (http://www.flickr.com/photos/33437642@N02/sets/