I am almost two weeks into my life at Brocade and I am pleased to say that I have hit the ground running and am proud to be spearheading the company’s EMEA operations, and positing my first blog. My first couple of days at Brocade were spent in Staines, near London, meeting my EMEA management team. While Staines itself is... um, interesting... getting to meet members of my team was an invigorating experience. The passion and commitment from the organisation is unmatched and coupled with the market opportunity ahead of us, I am relishing the challenge ahead.

While this was my first visit to Staines, it wasn’t my first to the area. As London... Read more

While sitting at the airport, I looked around and noticed nearly every person was thumbing away on their smartphones or browsing online multimedia via their laptops. We are literally connected every minute of the day and the number of devices has only increased.  Even during this economic downturn, North American smartphone sales jumped to nearly 50 million units in 2009, that’s up 25 percent over 2008. As analysts foresee the smartphone trend to climb at an even steeper rate due to younger and older customers (450 million smartphone’s predicted to be sold per yet by 2013!), Internet Service Providers are frantically looking to strengthen their network infrastructure to satisfy our bandwidth needs for today and prepare them for the massive growth in the coming years.

If you’ve ever been to... Read more

In my last post, I talked about how we all – in our personal, and for those of us in technology, our professional lives – are trying to simplify and do more with less. This all sounds good in a data center unless it increases risk and/or lessens our actual visibility for control over our data and applications. We all get great offers and PowerPoint slides about how vendors A, B and C can easily simplify our data center and consolidate tier 1 and tier 2 applications down to virtualized servers.... but often, I am left wondering several things: Have these vendors done this before? Will they be around to support it? Will it really be cheaper when I calculate the OpEx required to manage all... Read more

Ever since we first started designing it, there’s been a great deal of focus on maximizing efficiency at the new Brocade San Jose campus. From the outset, we’ve put considerable thought and effort into how to contain space, power, cooling, and management costs. In terms of operational costs, servers are both a significant portion of the IT spend for Brocade and a good way to drive efficiency.

Brocade IT has standardized on blade platforms for all of our X86 processing needs. Although replacing individual legacy X86 platforms required investment, the efficiencies gained through standardized management—lower cooling costs, better power and space management—are expected to deliver significant OpEx reduction and long-term cost savings. Another underestimated bonus of blade platforms is physical... Read more