White and Gold Brocade Fabric

Data center fabrics are ideal network underlays for the New IP. That’s because their design inherently takes advantage of the virtual constructs of server virtualization, network virtualization, and SDN. Data center fabrics are agile, automated, easy to scale up or out, and can adapt instantaneously to changes in traffic flows, packet sizes, and protocols. Still, not all data center fabrics are alike.

Our experience with network fabrics has taught us how to deliver operational efficiencies that will make your life easier today and enhance your network’s value as you transition to the New IP. It starts with the selecting the right fabric and the best platform building blocks for your environment.

Unnecessary network complexity can stop a growing company in its tracks. That is why the simplicity of Brocade fabrics was of key importance.

The Brocade VCS Fabric gives you seamless scalability for Layer 2 deployments of up to 10, 000 servers. It provides turnkey automation and plug-and-play scalability that let you evolve to a cloud model on your own time and terms, with full investment protection and without the steep cost and learning curve of developing script-based solutions.

The Brocade IP Fabric is an open, automated, programmable solution for large data center deployments of up to 2 million servers. It’s based on a cloud-proven, BGP-based Layer 3 design that easily integrates with popular data center ecosystem tools, so you can leverage your current investments for a seamless evolution to the cloud.

Brocade VDX switches support the Brocade VCS Fabric and the Brocade IP Fabric, so you can standardize on one data center switch family and implement the fabric that suits your needs. You can use different fabrics for different areas of your business, or start with one fabric and evolve to the other without hardware changes.

Brocade SLX routers easily integrate with VDX switches in IP Fabric deployments. Delivering ultimate scalability, the SLX 9850 is the perfect fit for IP Fabric spine or super-spine capacity to aggregate high performance VDX leaf switches serving the ongoing explosion of network devices and services today and well into the future.

Both the Brocade VCS Fabric and the Brocade IP Fabric dramatically reduce deployment times and the potential for human error through automation across the entire network lifecycle—from initial provisioning, configuration, and validation to troubleshooting and remediation with event-driven automation. That automation is delivered through Brocade Workflow Composer—a network automation platform that enables cross-domain workflows.

Brocade has really great seamless support for OpenStack orchestration. This allows us to offer anything from bare-metal dedicated networking to cloud networking. In the past, provisioning a customer required at least two hours. Today, customers can order from a self-service portal and get exactly what they need within 20 or 30 minutes.

Brocade data center fabrics leverage Brocade Workflow Composer to deliver the utmost in extensible Network Automation that is integrated with other IT services tool chains. Brocade Workflow Composer provides customizable turnkey automation workflows along with support for community-preferred tools such as Python, Puppet, Mistral, and YANG model-based REST and NETCONF APIs. Together, these automated workflows and open tools enable straightforward customization and extensibility for optimized delivery of current and future cross-domain IT services.

In addition, cloud orchestration and control through OpenStack integrations, VMware vRealize plugins, and the Brocade OpenDaylight-based SDN controller support full network integration with compute and storage resource provisioning and management.

Brocade data center fabrics also support controller-based network virtualization architectures such as VMware NSX, and the Brocade BGP-EVPN Network Virtualization controller-less architecture. The choice of VMware NSX certified Brocade Layer 2 or Layer 3 fabrics lets you select the optimal underlay to address your unique requirements, with the assurance that it’s been tested and validated by VMware. Brocade BGP-EVPN Network Virtualization eliminates the need for an external controller by leveraging open standards-based protocols to enable workload agility, segmentation and security within and across data centers.