The Data Driver

Brocade is making new investments in India as an additional base to support the company’s New IP innovations. Brocade announced the opening of a new state-of-the-art Development Center in Bangalore, and stated it will invest US$300 million in India over the next five years. The new Center reaffirms Brocade’s commitment to accelerating growth in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, and will play an important role in the development of networking innovations based on the New IP architecture.

Brocade announced new innovations to its campus Local Area Network (LAN) switch family to help organizations realize the vision of The Effortless Network® and build the foundation for the New IP.

Cloud Plus, a wholesale provider of private cloud solutions, is turning to Brocade for its next-generation data center and MPLS network infrastructure. The company is applying its own on-demand playbook to the network upgrade by leveraging the pay-as-you-go flexibility of the Brocade Network Subscriptionacquisition model.
Cloud Plus saw its revenues grow by 191 percent in the financial year ending in June 2013. It achieved 147 percent growth levels in fiscal year 2014, and is on schedule to exceed that growth in 2015. The data traffic running over its network has actually been growing at an even faster pace, as a result of the telecommunication industry’s falling costs for network bandwidth and the ability of Cloud Plus partners to execute larger deals that deliver data transfer at a lower price.

Brocade announced the appointment of Christine Heckart to the position of Chief Marketing Officer (CMO).  In this role, Ms. Heckart will be responsible for the strategic direction of Brocade’s global marketing organization, helping to position the company as the network provider of choice to the world’s data centers.  Ms. Heckart will report directly to Brocade’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Lloyd Carney.

In her new role, Ms. Heckart will be instrumental in driving the strategy to generate brand awareness and to develop and execute demand generation programs across the globe. These Marketing initiatives will align and support the company’s business strategy for growth built on leading the industry in data center fabrics and driving market penetration in the emerging Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) and Software-Defined Networking (SDN) arenas.

Brocade announced that Rackspace, the open cloud company, has completed the deployment of Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN solutions across its global data center network to accommodate explosive customer growth. The new Gen 5 Storage Area Network (SAN) has helped the company achieve greater density, flexibility and scale in connecting to high-performance EMC storage arrays, resulting in increased efficiency and productivity at each data center.

Rackspace is a global leader in hybrid cloud computing and founder of OpenStack, the open-source operating system for the cloud. Hundreds of thousands of customers look to Rackspace to deliver the best-fit infrastructure for their IT needs, leveraging a product portfolio that allows workloads to run where they perform best—whether on the public cloud, private cloud, dedicated servers, or a combination of platforms. Last year, Rackspace also began offering a portfolio of security and network offerings based on the Brocade Vyatta vRouter software…

Brocade announced continued innovation and leadership in storage networking to support solid state storage system vendors who have adopted Fibre Channel as the protocol of choice to optimize application performance in enterprise storage area networking (SAN) environments. In addition to a new solid state storage system qualification program, the company also announced support for today’s launch of Gen 6 Fibre Channel by the Fibre Channel Industry Association (FCIA).

Solid state storage vendors continue to choose Fibre Channel as the networking protocol of choice by solid state storage system vendors because of its reliability, stability and ability to optimize application performance and availability. Today, a majority of solid state storage system vendors are now shipping systems with Fibre Channel connectivity including Dell, EMC, HDS, HP, IBM, NetApp, Nimbus Data, Pure Storage, Tegile Systems and Violin Memory.

Brocade announced the appointment of Adam Judd to the role of vice president for Asia Pacific (APAC). Judd will be responsible for the strategic direction and management of all sales and business development across the region, delivering aggressive growth targets for the Brocade® Ethernet/IP business and further strengthening the company’s partner and channel strategies.

Judd will be based in Singapore and will report directly to senior vice president of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations, Jeff Lindholm.

Megaport is aiming to become a leading provider of network interconnection services across the Asia-Pacific region by leveraging the power of Brocade® MLXe Core Routers. The platform, implemented for Megaport by Brocade partner ASI Solutions, features the first delivery of 100 Gbps network services in the region from Brocade. The solution is based on Brocade 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) cards, which provide the massive routing capacity along with cost-effective support. As a result, Megaport believes it has an opportunity to make waves in the interconnect marketplace and meet the needs of organizations that are generating and consuming ever-increasing amounts of data.

Brocade announced that end-to-end Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel storage area network (SAN) solutions are now supported with the EMC® VMAX® product family.
The combined EMC and Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel solution enables best-in-class networking and storage to support highly virtualized cloud infrastructures. This solution allows enterprises to deploy a storage infrastructure featuring EMC®Connectrix® 16 Gbps Fibre Channel modular and fixed-port switches and 16 Gbps Fibre Channel-capable VMAX storage arrays. Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel SAN switches are sold by EMC under the Connectrix brand.

Brocade announced the appointment of Ari Bose to the position of Chief Information Officer (CIO). Responsible for the strategic transformation of the global Brocade IT organization, Bose will report to Gale England, vice president of Customer Advocacy and Operational Effectiveness. The data center networking industry is in the midst of a dramatic transformation. With increasing pressure being placed on corporate networks to manage rising data volumes and extract the most value out of existing assets in order to increase business efficiency, IT organizations are now a strategic business partner and no longer a back-office function.

Brocade has announced the availability of new Brocade Fabric Vision technology capabilities, delivering the industry's most advanced storage area network (SAN) management solution. The new features, Monitoring and Alerting Policy Suite (MAPS) and Flow Vision, provide breakthrough capabilities that dramatically simplify SAN administration and reduce operational costs, while further improving the availability and performance of Brocade Fibre Channel SANs.