Brocade launches Ethernet fabric switches

FRANKFURT, GERMANY: Networking company Brocade announced its new range of Ethernet fabric switching solutions, Brocade VDX 6720 data centre switches.

The company claims that Brocade VDX 6720 is a new family of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) offerings that 'revolutionize' Layer 2 Ethernet networking to create the 'first true' Ethernet fabric.

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It further adds that the switches eliminate the need for Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), collapsing the access and aggregation networking layers to create a flat, multipath, deterministic network that is ideal for virtualized environments.

Features:
The Brocade VDX 6720 Data Center Switches are available in one- or two-rack-unit (1U or 2U) form factors and provide the ability to scale from 16 to 60 ports with pay-as-you-grow Ports on Demand (POD) licensing.

The switches provide full 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) wire-speed performance from any port to any port, with latency of 600 nanoseconds (ns).

The switches are based on low-latency, lossless, 10 Gbps Data Center Bridging (DCB) technology and are capable of running all types of data and storage traffic --including traditional IP, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

The Brocade VDX 6720 switches deliver Brocade VCS technology, announced in June 2010.

"Today's infrastructure is not sufficient to handle new applications, and not flexible enough for a world where applications are mobile. It's clear that data center networks need to be upgraded to increase performance, reduce latency and eliminate downtime. They also need to be designed specifically to support highly virtualized and cloud-optimized data centers," said Dave Stevens, Brocade CTO.

The Brocade VDX 6720 data centre switches are available now, starting at $10,700.