The Cube – Brocade Tech Day – Jason Nolet, Brocade, with John Furrier and Stu Miniman

Brocade’s Tech Day is an annual draw for analysts in the networking space, and also an opportunity for Brocade to unveil a new product. Jason Nolet, VP of Data Center & Enterprise Network for Brocade, announced the new VDX Switch, the VDX 8770, at the company’s event earlier this week. Nolet also touched on his thoughts on server virtualization and Openflow.

According to Nolet, fabric technology has been in the lead for the past couple years, and Brocade was actually among the first to begin using this term.  They were also the first to ship out product. They now have VCS fabric technology.

The VDX 8770 has up to 8,000 parts in a fabric and 380,000 VMs attached to a single fabric. The latency is low at 3.58 microseconds and 4 Terabits. It is the “backplane to allow for the adoption of the data center technologies as they emerge.”

VMware is dependent on the networking infrastructures coming to the table and enabling VXLAN. They can’t do it without the VXLAN gateway capability and VXLAN Switching, so this is where fabric technology like VCS comes in, able to understand VXLAN properly.

And as far as server virtualization, it seems to be well established. VMware is up 50-60% in the virtualization market.

“The network is the next battleground, it’s the next area where we can try more flexibility through virtualization,” Nolet said.

He also touched on how Open flow unleashes innovation for architecture. There are two different types of innovation: traditional switch firmware and open flow-based applications that have the ability to influence network behavior.

Customers seem to be in “education mode” nowadays. They want to know what’s in it for them.  And two challenges customers realize is when you add a new technology like open flow or network virtualization, the overlay infrastructure is not being removed. It still needs to be scaled, managed, diagnosed and upgraded, which can add additional operational over-head administrative burdens, but that can be mitigated if a VCS fabric that’s more reliable and more efficient is deployed. The second challenge is that customers are not sure if network open flow is exclusive to legacy routing and forward techniques.

According to Nolet, no one is going to stop doing traditional forwarding techniques or traditional routing in an established network for the sake of over flow. They will instead be added as supplementary.

See the full interview below: