Brocade has unveiled three new data center switches – SLX 9140, SLX 9240 and SLX 9540, as part of an expanded Brocade® SLX® family , that feature unparalleled network visibility and the addition of Brocade Workflow Composer™ Automation Suites for turnkey automation.
The switches deliver flexible leaf, spine and edge connectivity while leveraging the Brocade SLX Insight Architecture™.
Yarob Sakhnini, regional director, MEMA at Brocade says, “As organizations continue to transform their business and adapt to new digital workloads, IT operations teams struggle to keep pace with the volume and variety of data going across their networks. In order to meet customer and end-user service and application expectations and remain competitive, organizations need to provide service and application assurance, improve operational efficiencies, and in some cases, enable new monetization opportunities. To accomplish this, they need comprehensive visibility into the operational state of the network and into the traffic that is transiting the network.”
“Brocade SLX family is the industry’s first data center networking portfolio to deliver agility at all layers of the data center stack, while being open to provide customers with choice. With Brocade, organizations can build networks that allow them to quickly adapt to technology transitions, deliver new services at cloud speed and accelerate digital transformation.”
By embedding network visibility on every router and switch, organizations can achieve pervasive visibility throughout the network to quickly identify problems, accelerate mean-time-to-remediation and improve overall service levels. The Brocade SLX 9140 and 9240 extend these capabilities with a programmable ASIC that provides Visibility Services from the physical wire to virtual networks and workloads.
Brocade® SLX™Insight Architecture™ and Brocade SLX Visibility Services deliver a new approach to network monitoring and troubleshooting that makes it faster, easier, and more cost-effective to get the comprehensive, real-time visibility needed for network operations and automation.
This innovative approach provides comprehensive visibility from the network to the workload including the ability to address end-user application or service needs, analyze, automate, and generate reports on context-rich data, and provide the fine-grain targeted visibility needed to tune the network for specific device or service needs.
New automation suites, including Network Essentials, Data Center Fabrics and Internet Exchange Points for the Brocade Workflow Composer platform, powered by StackStorm, provide automated network provisioning, validation, troubleshooting and remediation workflows.
These automation suites are ideal for customers who want to jumpstart their automation journey with pre-built workflows to accelerate time-to-value. Introduced earlier this year, Brocade Workflow Composer is a server-based, DevOps-style network automation platform that integrates across IT domains for end-to-end workflow automation.
“Organizations that are going through digital transformation need networks that are extremely agile, extensively automated and highly visible,” said Jason Nolet, senior vice president, Switching, Routing and Analytics Products Group, Brocade. “Brocade is delivering the breadth and depth of flexibility and agility that sets us apart from other network providers. We do so vertically across the data center stack, and horizontally across domains within the data center—while being open at every layer.”
Brocade Workflow Composer Automation Suites
Designed to run with the Brocade Workflow Composer platform, Brocade automation suites are ideal for IT organizations seeking to embrace automation but have limited automation development skills and resources.
The suites provide out-of-box network lifecycle automation for commonly performed tasks and are packaged to address major use cases. Each automation suite includes documentation and a collection of turnkey, yet customizable workflows, services, sensors, actions, and rules. Customers can use Brocade automation suites as is or as starter kits for building or customizing workflows specific to their data center requirements to reduce time-to-value.
“Enterprises want to build datacenter networks that emulate those of the web-scale giants, but they frequently lack the in-house expertise and resources required to implement such networks and to operate them effectively. As such, they turn to trusted vendors as key partners that can provide them with technologies that are easy to consume, deploy, and manage. Brocade’s approach to embedding visibility into their switches, combined with enhanced automation and programmability, can help organizations transform their networks to align with their digital-transformation initiatives,” said, Brad Casemore, research director, Datacenter Networks, IDC.
