At a time when enterprise community looks forward to transform their network infrastructure, innovation around software driven networking and network function virtualisation is set to drive enterprise productivity to the next level of optimisation.
George Chacko, Systems Engineer Manager and Lead Technical Consultant, Brocade speaks with Zia Askari from ChannelDrive.in on how SDN and NFV will drive virtualised data centers and create value for the ecosystem.
What are some of the big priorities for Brocade today?
Brocade sees a transformation happening in data centers. We have witnessed triple digit growth in the last year for Brocade and some significant capitalization of market share. Brocade wants to keep growing at this pace and engage itself in the software revolution around data centers and leverage the maximum of its market leading technologies for the Indian service providers.
Going into 2015, a key priority for us is to enable customers transition from the old IP to the New IP (Internet Protocol), which is defined by new levels of flexibility in the infrastructure, open-source driven standards, and embrace it fully to gain significant benefits. Put simply, the New IP is the industry’s recognition that traditional networks are unable to cope with the demands of today’s highly virtualized environments running on the cloud, and that the old IP is actually inhibiting organizations from realizing the unlimited possibilities of the cloud.
This transition will deal with a fundamental change of how networking models have been thought about until now, and how they will transform going forward in order to support the massive scale of today’s powerful compute models.
How does Brocade look at the solutions provider community in India?
With the software revolution gaining momentum in India, there is a lot of expectation and curiosity around what SDN and NFV can do for the software networking solutions industry. By leveraging SDN and NFV, service providers will be able to build thousands of virtualized data centers over the next decade instead of a few mega data centers.
This effectively will translate into service agility, increasing a service provider’s ability and pace to innovate services offered to the end customer. In this case, probably an application store dedicated to SDN, just like application store for Apple or Android is what one can expect. Vendors and the communities that are part of the OpenSource platform can come together and develop a store like this which will be a one stop place where customers and users can explore applications developed for software networking. This will be the result of an industry-led initiative based on Open Source networking instead of a proprietary app store.
How important is this community for the growth of Brocade in India?
The service provider segment provides a faster and industry wide adoption of SDN. CIOs in India are forward looking and are dealing with the challenges of optimizing infrastructures, innovating continuously and achieving more resilience for their networks besides reducing costs. This segment can help CIOs in India to be on that edge of innovation with software networking fields along with applications designed for SDN and NFV.
As enterprises look at strengthening their data centers to meet rigorous demands, software is playing an increasingly important role here. What are your observations on this trend?
Today, the networks are mostly software defined and Brocade is leading this space with the Vyatta platform. We have recently done a few public testing with Tier 1 global service providers for their software networking platforms where we have reached an unprecedented 80Gbps on an Intel x86 server which is at least 10 times faster than our nearest competitors. We are also looking at proof-of-concepts in India and garnering good interest from CIOs on deployments slowly moving into production networking.
The understanding level has risen exponentially and this has helped vendors like us who can support these kinds of applications. I strongly feel that the deployment and adoption rate of software networking is going to pump up rapidly in the next few years.
What are some of the key trends in the enterprise IT space that are set to increase their productivity levels? And where can Brocade help in this regard?
Network Functions Virtualization, BYOD, and Internet of Things are some of the key areas. Brocade is also looking at bringing in automation and orchestration capabilities into our network offering from both hardware and software perspectives. We can expect that the current engineers will be re-deployed into more effective areas to increase revenue generation which will bring down the overhead costs to maintain a network infrastructure.
How is Brocade helping enterprises towards virtualizing their data center environments?
We are working closely with our partners VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, etc. in the software virtualization space. These partners are virtualizing the compute layer and the storage layer as well as the network layer in our networking platforms to facilitate a complete solution to the customer. The level of integration with our partners is very high as well as with the Open Source networking community. To bring in software definition into the network, Brocade develops solutions in understanding with these communities for an excellent networking experience for the customer.
Brocade provides agile networks for faster transmissions and we have been praised by enterprises over and over for the business outcomes they have achieved after partnering with us. In 2014, Brocade technology was chosen and deployed by two leading service providers – Videocon D2H and Micromax – for their data centers and supporting their business expansion.
How big would be the Indian market for Brocade? And where is the future growth likely to come from?
India remains as one of the most promising markets for Brocade. We have already seen triple digit growth y-o-y here and there is tremendous potential going forward. One of the key drivers of this significant result is our Ethernet Fabrics. Brocade’s traditional OEM partners have started evaluating these fabric solutions, scale out applications like Hadoop, IT Storage, VDI and other virtualized applications which require a scale-out architecture. Brocade’s Ethernet Fabrics is the largest production deployed fabric in the networking industry today. Brocade’s fabric approach for data centers has helped us gain huge market share in this area. This year we are hopeful to see quite some production deployments happening in the SDN and NFV space as well in India which will help us continue this remarkable growth.
