Brocade has announced its continued support for the OpenStack initiative through the introduction of a new Brocade VCS fabric plugin for enterprise and service provider customers, which delivers on-demand fabric provisioning capabilities in OpenStack-based cloud environments.
Available as a component of the OpenStack Grizzly release, the Brocade VCS plugin expands the native attributes of Brocade VCS Fabric technology — network automation, efficiency and elasticity — by coupling these benefits with the ease of provisioning provided by OpenStack. This will allow customers to deploy network capacity and services in their cloud-based data centers on demand.
“The benefit of deploying a private or public cloud built on OpenStack is that it gives the customer the utmost level of flexibility and control when provisioning essential components within an open cloud architecture,” said John Igoe, vice president of Rackspace Private Cloud. “The inclusion of Brocade as a part of the Rackspace Private Cloud reference architecture addresses the desire of our customers to have choice in their distributions. Innovative companies like Brocade, who are committed to supporting open initiatives, enable customers to fully capitalize on their IT investments without risk of vendor or technology lock-in associated with proprietary platforms.”
In addition to delivering the Brocade VCS fabric plugin, Brocade is also delivering a Fibre Channel blueprint for storage networking. With the delivery of a framework for Fibre Channel zone management, aimed at ensuring investments in mission-critical Fibre Channel Storage Area Networks (SANs) are protected as they move to cloud architectures.
“Brocade is currently the only networking vendor offering OpenStack-compatible solutions with advanced fabric-enabled capabilities that support cloud-based, scale-out data center infrastructures,” said Jason Nolet, vice president of the Data Center Networking Group at Brocade. “In addition to delivering OpenStack support for Brocade products that accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies and deliver on the promise of The On-Demand Data Center, Brocade is an active contributor to the OpenStack development community, taking an active leadership role in driving innovation in important areas of the framework, such as the addition of Fibre channel SAN provisioning into OpenStack.”
Earlier this month, Red Hat announced that Brocade is a member of the Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network, which is aimed at the continued innovation and development of the OpenStack framework.
“The Red Hat OpenStack Cloud Infrastructure Partner Network and its commercial support is an important step as we establish a robust ecosystem aimed at accelerating customer adoption of the Red Hat OpenStack distribution,” said Mike Werner, senior director of the OpenStack ecosystem at Red Hat. “The expertise and networking innovation Brocade brings to the program is a welcome addition as we see great alignment in our respective visions.”
