Dong-Eui University To Virtualize Data Center With Brocade Switches
Dong-Eui University, a leading private university in South 
Korea’s thriving Southeast region, has set out to virtualize its data center by leveraging the power of Brocade® VCS® Fabric technology. The university, which has a strong reputation in the fields of oriental medicine and engineering, is executing a phased plan to deploy cloud computing infrastructure to support administration, teaching, and research.
Key to this plan is the availability of a scalable network infrastructure capable of supporting the high-bandwidth requirements of multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) running on VMware ESXi hosts. As a private institution, Dong-Eui University was also keen to avoid large upfront costs at the start of the virtualization program.
“Compared to what our established network vendor was able to offer, Brocade VDX® switches running VCS Fabric technology provide remarkable value without compromising capacity, performance, or stability,” said Jong-Yoo Kim, Head of IT at Dong-Eui University. “We’ve been extremely impressed with the advanced capabilities of the VCS Fabric technology and Brocade has enabled us to start with a small deployment, secure in the knowledge that we can easily scale in an incremental but linear manner.”
The Brocade VDX 6740 switches that the university selected as the foundation of its new data center network support up to 64 wire-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports, with the units being deployed with an initial 24 active ports and the option to activate more in eight-port increments under Brocade’s pay-as-you grow Ports on Demand (PoD) licensing model. Thanks to the embedded VCS Fabric technology, any additional switches connected to the network are auto-configured to become part of the Ethernet fabric, which acts as a single intelligent switch.
Strong integration with VMware solutions was also a key factor in the university’s choice. As Brocade VCS Fabric technology is VM-aware, it is able to look into the hypervisor, detect the presence of new VMs, extract the network profile information, and automatically apply it to every switch in the fabric. As VMs are moved between servers, the fabric automatically migrates their profile information as well, maintaining visibility as traffic moves from a VM across a physical infrastructure to a physical endpoint. The Brocade VDX switches also support NSX, VMware’s network virtualization platform for the software-defined data center.
“Dong-Eui University clearly understands that data center virtualization is a long-term undertaking and that deploying an intelligent network infrastructure which can easily be grown in line with demand is a smart way to start,” said Mike Lee, Country Manager of Brocade Korea. “With South Korean university budgets under continual pressure, this is a great example of how to manage the transition to cloud computing.”
In addition to the Brocade VDX 6740 switches, the university has also deployed Brocade 6510 SAN switches to support its virtualization program. While these switches provide Gen 5 Fibre Channel (16 Gigabits per second) ports rather than 10 GbE, they mirror the Brocade VDX switches in many respects, offering pay-as-you-grow scalability along with self-learning, self-healing fabric configuration.
With Ethernet and Fibre Channel fabrics in place, Dong-Eui University has an extremely robust foundation for its virtual data center operations, with duplex data and storage connectivity to every ESXi host in order to provide system redundancy across the technology infrastructure.
