Brocade Proposes OpenStack Innovations for Environments with Multiple Data Centers

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, 14th May, 2014-- Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today at OpenStack Summit announced a proposal for a new OpenStack service to support inter-data center multitenancy. For companies with multiple data centers, it provides a more flexible and automated solution that addresses the challenge of maintaining connectivity and policy context for virtual machines migrating between data centers. This proposal is the first effort of its kind and addresses a key challenge for companies using multiple data centers as a distributed pool of on-demand resources.

For Managed Service Provider (MSP) and Cloud Service Provider (CSP) companies this proposal, which was jointly developed with Huawei, has the potential to simplify the manageability and overall efficiency of inter-data center multitenancy. This proposal is one of Brocade’s many ongoing activities in support of OpenStack.

Earlier contributions include Fibre Channel (FC) Zone Manager, which was released as part of the OpenStack Icehouse release supporting key FC SAN functionality. Cinder, the OpenStack Block Storage service, creates a layer of abstraction that supports connectivity of multiple iSCSI and FC storage devices. The FC Zone Manager extends Cinder’s FC support to provide automated SAN zoning. In today’s OpenStack environments, FC SANs are either pre-zoned or open-zoned. Pre-zoning introduces complexity in cloud orchestration and involves considerable manual effort that may be error-prone. The Automated Zone Management overcomes challenges and limitations related to complexity and human error resulting from FC SAN zoning.

"With our 1500 commits in Icehouse release, Hewlett Packard continues to be one of the top contributors of software to OpenStack community and is delighted to have partnered with Brocade for extension of Fiber Channel Switching capabilities in OpenStack Icehouse release.  Brocade's leadership on the FC Zone Manager addition OpenStack Icehouse release brings tremendous value to our large installed-base of HP 3PAR StoreServ storage and Brocade/HP B-series Fibre Channel fabric customers. Brocade is a longtime partner and we are happy to work together to continue to innovate with the OpenStack Community," said Rob Strechay, director software-defined storage at HP.

“We have been working with the OpenStack Community for many years. We value the innovation that results from the intense development effort of the participating members and are committed to ongoing contributions to help move the industry forward. Public and private clouds are still evolving, so Brocade continues to prioritize projects such as OpenStack and OpenDaylight to enhance the orchestration and control framework for cloud infrastructure and services. Collaboration efforts like this are what help customers deploy enhanced cloud services,” said Ken Cheng, chief technology officer, Brocade.

Partner Ecosystem

Brocade works with a best-in-class partner ecosystem to support service providers and enterprise IT organizations requiring a seamless OpenStack deployment and support experience.

Brocade is committed to OpenStack and is optimizing its data center networking portfolio for this open-source cloud platform. The company also provides plugins to the networking layers of OpenStack, enabling organizations to improve the multitenant workflow agility and orchestration across their private and public cloud infrastructures. These Brocade OpenStack solutions, delivered in partnership with Canonical, HP, Mirantis, Piston Cloud, Rackspace, and Red Hat provide highly reliable and automated physical networks with the flexibility of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) for organizations transitioning to cloud architectures.

“Our partnership with Brocade is important to us as it builds on work we’ve already done together for the OpenStack community. We’ve seen that Brocade shares our commitment to OpenStack standards and the value it brings to the technology industry in driving innovation. Agility and innovation are at the heart of what IT departments require within public and private networks. This partnership helps us deliver best in class solutions to the OpenStack community,” said Adrian Ionel, chief executive officer, Mirantis.

Brocade is also working towards enhancing the networking subsystem of OpenStack to support NFV and multivendor environments. Through this ongoing innovation, Brocade is helping to accelerate the evolution toward robust, cloud-based solutions.