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 Heathrow airport is merely a few miles away, I recognized a lot of the surrounding area – albeit, normally seen from a few thousand feet up and through layers of cloud. However, as a frequent traveller based in Europe, I am sick and tired of hearing about clouds! “Alberto, what are you going on about?” I hear you say. You probably remember reading about how travel schedules across most of Europe were terrorised by a plume of volcanic ash during April and May. Southern Iceland's Eyjafjallajoekull volcano grounded flights across European air space, leaving countless travellers stranded.

Now, you are probably wondering why I mention clouds and volcanic ash? At the same time travel chaos hit Europe, Brocade conducted a survey of 200 European CIOs to find out how they were embracing cloud-based computing models. Our findings showed that European enterprises are beginning to embrace the business opportunities offered by virtualizing assets and accessing applications through the cloud.

More than 60 percent of enterprises are expecting to have started the planning and migration to a distributed – or cloud – computing model within the next two years. Why? Well, respondents told us that the key business drivers for doing so are to reduce cost (30 percent), improve business efficiency (21 percent) and enhance business agility (16 percent).

The findings reinforce Brocade’s vision that data centers and networks will evolve to a highly virtualized, services-on-demand state enabled through the cloud. Brocade recently outlined its vision, called Brocade One™, at its annual Technology Day. Brocade One is a unifying network architecture and strategy that enables customers to simplify the complexity of virtualizing their applications. By removing network layers, simplifying management and protecting existing technology investments, Brocade One helps customers migrate to a world where information and services are available anywhere in the cloud.

The days when the majority of computing power was in the data center are behind us. Today, we have incredibly smart end points with lots of computing power that are remote, distributed and mobile. Information and applications are virtualized and can reside anywhere within the cloud. While our findings show that European adoption is on the rise, businesses need to address a number of very real challenges/concerns to reap the benefits of the cloud – enterprises, in the majority of cases, are investing in the development of a private cloud infrastructure due, in part, to concerns over security. Over a third of respondents cited security as the most significant barrier to cloud adoption, closely followed by the complexities of virtualizing data centers, network infrastructure and bandwidth.

As data centers become distributed, the network infrastructure must take on the characteristics of a data center. And if the network becomes your data center, then the network is your business. For the cloud to work, the network needs to be scalable and deliver high performance and security – without these traits any migration is doomed. What our research tells us is that companies are now recognising the profound economic implications of adopting cloud solutions and are ready to make the journey of adoption, but only if the foundation infrastructure is sound.

Brocade is once again ahead of the competition with Brocade One as the unifying architectural vision. We can help ensure that businesses can migrate to a cloud-based environment, and deliver that sound foundation they require. Now, if we can figure out how to keep planes in the air during volcano eruptions I will be a very happy man.

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 Las Vegas for a convention, then you know first-hand what it means when too many mobile users are on a limited number of 3G towers.  It’s almost like reverting back to dial-up days without the modem beeps and pings. This is a perfect example of the statistic that shows that only eight percent of Smartphone users are able to drive about 75 percent of total data usage. The future introduction of Long Term Evolution along with the recent amendment to IEEE standard 802.11 only complicate the issue further and heighten the amount of congestion over mobile networks. With all of this driving up the network bandwidth over the current network infrastructure, it is obvious that something must be done to strengthen and widen these over-trafficked pipes. So what are the options? Today Brocade has the unique ability to trunk 32-ports of 10 GbE connections into a single link, but while this is a cost effective and currently available solution, it isn’t the panacea large Service Providers need for the long haul (no pun intended). Carriers worldwide are banging their fists for significantly higher speed solutions and the reality of it being available for purchase took a giant step forward on June 22 with the IEEE 802.3ba standard ratification for 40/100 GbE.

Brocade has been an active member in the IEEE standards and we already have pre-orders for 100 GbE blades months prior to our general availability date…even Apple addicts aren’t that fanatical. We clearly understand that higher speed technology is not only important for carrying the world's network traffic, but a critical source of revenue for equipment manufacturers, as a relatively small percentage of high speed ports capture a much larger portion of manufacturer revenue. So we’ll let Service Providers do what they do best, provide you with the affordable connectivity you need to run your bandwidth hungry applications and we’ll do what we do best, creating next generation high performance networking solutions to help transform the world.

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 those virtual server sessions I can no longer see and touch?

Enter the HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 virtualization bundle!

Today Brocade and HP launched a solution that has been specifically developed and designed to help customers migrate their real tier 1 and tier 2 applications to the cost-optimized world of server virtualization. HP is utilizing specific technologies from Brocade (adaptive networking and server application optimization) to make sure, as you move those applications to a virtualized environment, you can truly identify, monitor and assign QoS to each virtual machine (VM) and application all the way through the network. By providing true application and VM-aware networking, Brocade and HP together have addressed the top two concerns of providing performance under load and manageability in deploying server virtualization.

In addition to developing a turnkey solution with application visibility and control to allow top-tier applications to enjoy the benefits of the virtualized world, Brocade and HP are providing the HP StorageWorks P2000 G3 virtualization bundle to the market with a starting list price of $25,000, with significant savings to the aggregated component pieces.

Now, you just may be wondering, have these two partners ever done this before? In addition to pioneering the SAN industry, HP and Brocade have led -- by a wide margin -- true enterprise SAN development and enterprise implementations. Recently, HP has crossed the seven million Brocade SAN switch and director port milestone, and is rapidly well on the way to eight million. If that’s not experience, I don't know what is.

Happy virtualizing!

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 footprint standardization. On the face of it, having the “same size box” doesn’t seem to be a huge advantage, but once you consider issues like rack and cable plant planning, hot-aisle containment, and installation simplification, standardization has a significantly positive cost impact.

With the new campus deployment, the “heavy lift” server for monolithic workloads is the Sun M Series platform. This platform’s virtualization capabilities, coupled with SAN storage accessed via Brocade HBAs, provides a very stable foundation for code management systems and business applications. Migrating from a legacy environment with multiple UNIX variants into a single form factor with virtualization should improve the availability and performance experienced by engineering staff. Development code is replicated to and from Brocade HQ to multiple Brocade development sites worldwide, so performance and availability of these systems is paramount.

Virtualization has become the standard within Brocade, and a large part of the campus migration has been from physical to virtualized servers: 63% of our servers in the campus are now virtualized. The benefits of virtualization are well known and we’ve applied them to both our legacy and current needs. For instance, our customer and OEM partner relationships require long-term support of many legacy products. To back this support commitment, virtualization has allowed us to support multiple generations of legacy development environments without the corresponding plethora of physical servers that would otherwise have been needed. In addition, we can meet our current application needs with a reduced number of physical servers that each provide a platform for multiple VMs. Our virtualization approach is not dogmatic, and we use the best solution for the need at hand – e.g., Microsoft Hyper-V for Windows, and Sun Solaris Containers for Solaris systems and VMware for Linux systems. Moreover, virtualization is enabling Brocade IT to further its “cloud” computing strategy as well as lay the foundation for more effective business continuity solutions.

It should be stressed that the key component to making all of these standardized platforms a reality is centralized storage. One common factor in choosing blades and the Sun M series was that the systems, by design, only have sufficient storage to boot an operating system (if at all). This leaves all application and business data on centralized SAN and NAS storage and avoids the “islands” that occur with DAS. What makes all this storage viable is a robust high-performance networking infrastructure that utilizes the full range of Brocade SAN and IP products (data center, enterprise, and carrier).

Employee move-ins started last month and about 50 percent of all San Jose staff is now onsite at the new campus. And, with very few exceptions, it’s been a smooth transition. From a business continuity standpoint, the rigorous attention to detail throughout the planning and design phases of the new campus is now paying dividends. Thank you for your continued interest in the new campus and Brocade IT’s contributions.

There’s an old saying: People may doubt what you say, but they’ll believe what you do. I was reminded of that the other day during a walk-through at our new San Jose campus.

We said we would design and deliver a next-generation network platform capable of supporting the company’s business needs now and into the future. We also said we’d use the project as our opportunity to retire outdated legacy systems, consolidate network platforms and introduce technology solutions that were both eco-friendly and people-friendly. As we near the completion of this 24-month project, I can say without reservation that we’ve achieved all of that and more.

The same Brocade IP network technology that’s been helping us to limit downtime during our data migrations to the new campus will now provide secure, uninterrupted, high-speed connectivity across the campus. So what might we do with 1 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) to the desktop, 10 GbE in the data center core and 1 GbE to the WAN and Internet?

From day one, this high-performance network will help us ensure rich multimedia content delivery by supporting a variety of bandwidth-hungry applications and services. That includes voice communications based on VoIP and videoconferencing using traditional H.320 and Web services.

As we look ahead, the core and edge network infrastructure will deliver the bandwidth Brocade needs for future applications like Fixed Mobile Convergence and Unified Communications, including video to the desktop using Microsoft Office Communicator and high-definition Webcams such as Microsoft LifeCam Cinema.

When it’s completed next month, the next-generation wireless LAN we’ve designed will turn the entire facility into a Wi-Fi hotspot. Because of “always-on” access to business applications, our employees will be able to maximize their productivity, regardless of their location on campus. They will be connected whether they’re working at their desks, hosting multi-site video conferences, or simply moving between buildings.

Another example of how we intend to use our high-bandwidth Brocade IP network to enhance operations is the new fleet of Sharp multi-function peripherals (MFPs), which can print, scan, fax and copy documents. These state-of-the-art peripherals replace myriad workgroup and desktop devices that used too much energy and were expensive to maintain.

The new MFPs enable users to print to a single queue held on a central server in the data center (no more printer selection!), and then walk up to any MFP within the three building campus, swipe their employee badge and release their print job. The multi-10 GbE core-to-intermediate distribution frame (IDF) uplinks enable the fast routing of the print job from the server to the MFP where the user is located.

This means that documents are physically printed only when an employee is at the MFP. As a result, there will be no more waste caused by unclaimed printouts left at the print stations, and persons who previously needed desktop printers due to security concerns can now use the same MFPs as everyone else. Best of all, while this new approach improves the employee experience, it also improves productivity, reduces waste and lowers operating costs. It’s another great example of how doing the right thing from a business perspective is also the right thing to do from a people and environmental perspective.

Individually, these changes may not seem like much, but taken together they will give us the tools to work smarter and more efficiently. As always, thank you for your continued interest in my blog and in IT’s contributions at the new Bay Area campus. We haven’t crossed the finish line, but we’re definitely in the home stretch.

Tell me I am not alone on this… As my kids grow, my job demands increase, my body ages and I have to get a lot more accomplished in my personal life in the same fixed 7-day week…very real images enter my brain about all the data center managers I have met around the globe. Corporations are demanding more and more from their limited and often flat to down IT budgets and resources … just as life demands more from all of us as time moves forward in the same, fixed amount of time…and, at least in my case, with a less current-generation chassis!

Many of these factors are why you have seen Brocade and all of our global OEM partners continue to engage to develop more tightly integrated solutions that can be designed, procured, implemented and supported by single organizations. A recent example of this is Brocade’s work with IBM’s System x server organization. The System x group is “OEM’ing” two key platforms that are specifically designed for integration with server environments: the FCX 648 and the TurboIron 24X. With IBM selling 100’s of thousands of servers into data centers every year, their customers are asking for more tightly integrated server and networking solutions to reduce cost, improve service and manage risk while also laying the foundation for future demands on their IT. With Brocade’s deep data center networking experience, we have specifically designed our technology to not only meet the demands of today and the future, but also to be tightly integrated with broader solution providers’ overall solutions such as those from IBM.

Another great step toward simplification in the data center, while reducing costs and preparing for the future with latest generation technology. Does anybody know where I can get a new to slightly used, well-integrated chassis to simplify and streamline the operations in my personal life?

Here is my summary of our Q2 financial results, a solid quarter highlighted by strong growth in our Ethernet business and healthy end-user demand for our SAN products.

Mike