While other network equipment vendors, primarily Cisco Systems, are promoting their Ethernet fabric solutions, they're primarily just "marketing slides" and aren't actually shipping products, says Doug Ingraham, VP of product management at Brocade. "Many fabrics that you see today are very manual in terms of their configuration. Why? Because our competitors have started from a networking background ... they didn't approach it from a fabric in the beginning," Ingraham says.
De Persgroep--a Finnish media company that owns multiple newspapers, magazines, Web sites, and radio and TV stations--chose Brocade over Cisco for its recent network upgrade, says Wim Vanhoof, information and communications technology infrastructure manager for the company, at the Technology Day audience of journalists and industry analysts.
Brocade also launched a number of new products aimed at cloud service providers, including the Brocade MLXe Series Routers, which offer both 10 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet ports, the CER 2000 Series compact routers and the 6910 Ethernet Access Switch. The switches support both the present IPv4 Internet Protocol standard as well as the coming IPv6 standard.
"Cloud computing will fundamentally transform service providers and their business model," says Ken Cheng, VP of Brocade's service provider products division. "With our innovation in Internet fabric, data center routing and software-defined networking, we have the technology to enable this business transformation."
See more on this topic by subscribing to Network Computing Pro Reports Best Practices: Maximizing I/O (subscription required).