Hosted Services Company Builds Network for the Future with SDN-Ready Brocade VCS Fabric Technology
High-end hosted services provider RackCorp has started transitioning its data center operations to a new network foundation based on advanced Ethernet fabric infrastructure from Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD). The Sydney-based company, which operates from 21 data centers across nine countries, has embraced the Software-Defined Networking (SDN) capable family of Brocade® VDX® switches and VCS® Fabric technology to meet the high-availability and increasingly high-bandwidth requirements of its global client base.
“The primary driver for a new network was the ability to plan for more bandwidth. Whilst the RackCorp network is not currently experiencing large loads that impact performance, we could see that our previous capacity would be under stress within the next two to three years. This is a purely strategic deployment now to move to Brocade solutions that offer valid features and provide a roadmap for the future,” said RackCorp director and network operations manager, Stephen Dendtler.
“We have a renewed focus on the data network volume market and we need to scale up to cater for high volumes. This means moving to a 10 GbE footing, with the Brocade Ethernet fabric solution. We probably underestimated the significant benefits of Brocade fabric technology and now have a greater appreciation of how much easier it is to add more switching capacity and cloud-centric capabilities. As it is basically plug-and-play, this is going to be a significant benefit for RackCorp going forward as we scale our networks and it will also provide us the ability to deliver more complex customer solutions in an automated manner.”
Dendtler said that the Brocade solution was selected because it provides the highest performance in its price range, which allows the company to sell at a better price point resulting in better outcomes on both sides. “It also provides a greater incentive to grow our content delivery network and high-volume network services,” he said.
The SDN capabilities of the Brocade VDX switches were another key consideration in RackCorp’s decision. The company has been running an internally developed SDN system since 2004 to automate its network operations in Australia. Dendtler said that, since the new Brocade switches were integrated into the existing network, the time to propagate configuration changes has fallen from seconds to milliseconds.
“There’s a lot of talk in the market about SDN but a lot less productive use of the technology thus far,” said Gary Denman, Senior Director for Australia and New Zealand, Brocade. “RackCorp’s deployment of the Brocade VCS fabric shows Brocade’s SDN implementation is mature enough to support dynamic 24×7 software-as-a-service capabilities, with millions of dollars per hour being transacted by financial service clients.”
With the help of Brocade architecture planning, initial fabric deployments have been made at RackCorp data centers in Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth, Australia as well as Hong Kong to support dedicated server, virtual server, and cloud computing services. RackCorp will continue to deploy Brocade VDX switches throughout its global data center network. Brocade VDX 6710 switches on top of server racks each provide 48 ports for low-latency wire-speed 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) access, with six 10 GbE ports available for uplinks to support high-bandwidth virtual server hosts. Brocade VDX 6740 switches provide 10 GbE connectivity between the rack-top switches, data center routers, and upstream Internet transits, with VCS Fabric technology combining all the Brocade devices into an automated, efficient, highly available, and VM-aware network fabric.
