Cloudcentral Migrates To Brocade Data Center Networking Solutions For The New IP

Australian Managed Cloud Services Innovator Looks to Grow Without Compromise

CloudCentral — one of Australia’s leading managed infrastructure, platform, and application as a service pioneers — is embarking on its next phase of growth with Brocade® data center networking solutions that enable the New IP. In particular, the deployment of a cloud-ready Ethernet fabric is key to enabling the company’s continued exponential growth while adhering to 24/7 service level agreements and containing operating costs.

Since its foundation in 2010, CloudCentral has focused on offering local support and services to customers from Tier-3 Australian data centers to help ensure cloud performance, security, and data sovereignty. The company’s innovative Cloud-in-a-Box platform provides customers with a pre-converged, tested, and validated environment to provision private cloud capacity, which has proven to have strong market traction among service providers, software developers, enterprises, and public sector organizations.

“Organic growth from our existing customer base, together with new wins, is driving our expansion at an annual run rate of more than 50 percent. That in turn means we put a lot of focus on infrastructure reliability and streamlined operations,” said Kristoffer Sheather, founder and CEO of CloudCentral. “Compared to our previous-generation data center network, the Brocade solution is incredibly easy to manage and to scale. The level of intelligent automation enabled us to slot it into our overall cloud architecture without fuss and it performs faultlessly, allowing us to focus on meeting customers’ evolving needs with new services.”

With the new Brocade data center network infrastructure now in place, CloudCentral can now accommodate strong demand for its existing services while working to fill additional cloud market niches. Disaster recovery is becoming a significant growth area, and the company is preparing to launch cloud-based data storage services that will enhance its ability to support customers’ hybrid cloud operational models.

“CloudCentral has been a genuine home-grown pioneer in the development of Australia’s cloud-based services market. I’m very pleased Brocade is now a key partner in enabling its business to grow to a new level,” said Gary Denman, senior director for Australia and New Zealand, Brocade. “To keep growing in the cloud-first era of application hosting, service providers like CloudCentral must be able to scale their entire cloud infrastructure — compute, storage, security, and network — holistically and without compromise. That where Brocade’s technology for the New IP pays huge dividends.”

The Brocade Solution                                                                             The new network solution deployed at CloudCentral’s data centers in Canberra, Melbourne, and Sydney is based around Brocade VDX® 6740 10-GIGABIT ETHERNET SWITCHES that form a highly resilient and automated Ethernet fabric using Brocade VCS® FABRIC TECHNOLOGY, eliminating the need to use the Spanning Tree protocol. The Brocade solution integrates seamlessly with CloudCentral’s virtualized compute, storage, and security infrastructure, enabling frictionless cloud service operations with simple customer self-provisioning and service management.

CloudCentral also employs the Brocade vRouter, which runs as a virtual machine on standard x86 systems at each data center. It operates as a firewall segregating virtual LANs, carrying out deep packet inspection of network traffic, and supporting VPN connections between CloudCentral and its customer sites.