RIYADH — Brocade has further extended its partnership with VMware with the integration of its VCS Fabric technology with the VMware NSX solution. The unification of these market leading technologies will enable Saudi enterprises to virtualize their server environments with confidence in the Brocade VCS Gateway's ability to logically bridge the gap between physical components such as servers, storage devices and switches with the virtual elements of the network. “Enterprises in the Kingdom are rapidly virtualizing their server and storage devices to make their infrastructures more flexible, scalable, programmable and of course, more cost-effective. Now we are beginning to see a similar trend in the networking domain with the virtualization of network. However companies must keep in mind that they will have to retain large portions of their physical networks as well. Currently the tools that network managers use to manage their physical infrastructures give them little or no access or visibility into the virtual infrastructure,” said Sufian Dweik, regional director, MEMA, Brocade Communications. “The seamless integration between the physical and virtual networking elements is a must in virtualization endeavors. Through our collaboration with VMware, we have addressed this to deliver an agile and scalable networking infrastructure that can be managed through a single unified platform.” The Brocade VDX switch family, running VCS Fabric technology, is at the heart of the new gateway. Brocade's VCS Fabric technology is also central to the company's "on-demand data center" strategy which was launched in May this year. The switches can be deployed either independently or in a "fabric" layout which the company believes will serve as the foundation for software-defined networking (SDN) — a much talked about trend that is expected to see real-world implementation in the Saudi IT market within the next five years. The VMware NSX solution with the Brocade VCS Gateway is designed to be the logical step in the migration to cloud based IT architectures which, given the Kingdom's interest in the trend, could prove to be a big selling point of the solution. The Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX bridges the gap between legacy and cloud-based architectures by supporting a scalable, multi-tenant network virtualization environment. The solution also converts "tunnel connections" into IP connections for bare metal servers running non-virtualized applications, physical storage devices or specialized hardware running network services. Brocade announced that the Brocade VCS Gateway for VXLAN solution will be available in the fourth quarter of 2013. — SG
