This is the first in a series of blogs I am writing to cover technical topics as the industry gears up to build next-generation data center architectures. These blogs are intended to provide a basic overview of the innovations that Brocade and the industry at large are developing.

In today's introductory blog, we take a step back with an overview of a technology that we are very familiar with in the Ethernet world—Spanning Tree Protocol (STP). If you know Ethernet networking, you know that STP has been the primary protocol in Layer 2 LANs since the very beginnings of Ethernet. Its primary goal is to create a loop-free topology that provides a single active path between any two network endpoints, by shutting down all but one path between any two switches. While this approach has served the development of Ethernet well, STP does have bandwidth, performance, and, ultimate cost and management limitations in light of the advent of converged data center architectures.

Various networking vendors have developed mostly proprietary enhancements to STP to address these shortcomings, but these are all stopgap measures to mask network-level inefficiencies. As we move forward to the virtual data center and cloud computing architectures, these vendor-specific solutions will take too much time to reconverge when a link or switch goes down or an application migrates from one server to another. With STP, data can take a path through several switches because a shorter path is disabled. During the time it takes for links to reconfigure and reconverge, the entire network is unavailable. This is unacceptable for mission-critical applications, hence the move toward "lossless" Ethernet technologies—namely Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) or Data Center Bridging (DCB). (More on this in a later post.)

What is needed is to re-architect the way traffic should flow, so that it makes better use of all the available paths. This requires the building of larger, physical/logical networks (think flatter) to account for applications such as Virtual Machine (VM) mobility across interconnected hosts within a single network. Brocade is working with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) on a standard called Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL), which provides multiple paths via load splitting. TRILL will allow us to reclaim network bandwidth and improve utilization by establishing the shortest path through Layer 2 networks and spreading traffic more evenly. The net effect is that the network can respond faster to failures. By addressing the limitations that STP poses, the data center network will be able to scale to meet the demands of virtualized and cloud computing environments with on-demand Layer 2 network capacity.

In my next blog, I will explore the benefits of flattening your Layer 2 networks.

From Wingspan Guest Blogger Masakazu Aoba, VP Japan Sales:

June is the month which IT professionals get together to celebrate all things IP in Japan.  It’s the month of Interop Tokyo 2009.  The biggest networking technology event in Japan has just ended and it was the first time for Brocade to participate in the Interop Tokyo event as an exhibitor.

Even in the midst o f a“once-a-100-years” recession, so many people attended the expo, especially at the Brocade booth. Some people asked, “Where is Foundry?”. I also heard someone said, “Who is Brocade?”. We definitely had to explain that Brocade acquired Foundry and as a company we have now stepped into the “End-to-End Networking” world.  It’s the beginning of our long term relationship.

At the Brocade booth, we exhibited about 40 products including newly launched ServerIron ADX, FastIron CX, and TurboIron 24X, as well as some products and solutions from partners. These  products drew much attention from the visitors, though, the greatest catch of the year was, no doubt, Brocade FCoE/CEE solution which was demonstrated live. We had a half-rack with Brocade 8000, CNA, Brocade 300, FastIron EdgeX, and a Dell storage mounted. All these devices were connected through CEE, FCoE, and FC and this was the only live FCoE/CEE solution introduced at the three-day event. In fact, Brocade 8000 won the Special Award of the Best of Show Award program of Interop Tokyo 2009 in the category of Networking Infrastructure Product for Large Engerprises. Hooray!

Cleary, one of the key objectives for us to participate in this event this year was to let everyone living in the networking world, especially the residents of IP side of the world, know about who we are and what benefits we can provide as a new combined networking solutions vendor. For those who dropped by our booth, thank you for coming and hope you enjoyed learning about Brocade and our solutions. For those who didn’t have a chance to visit our booth or maybe the event itself, you can learn about more about us at www.brocadejapan.com.

Brocade is known for a couple of things – building Extraordinary Networks, and developing and maintaining close partnerships with other companies in ways that benefit customers  beyond the benefits that they would receive if Brocade “made it all here.” One of the areas in which we partner closely with other vendors to deliver a complete solution is campus wireless access, or WiFi.  Our focus on cross-compatibility not only among our own products but with many other vendors makes our combined offering here stronger and more flexible than single-vendor solutions.   With the increasingly distributed enterprise, the benefits of a combined WiFi offering are absolutely clear.

The driver for the growth in enterprise wireless   to this point is primarily due to convenience; the increased needs of a mobile enterprise. Moving forward, one of the major trends is that  wireless  is becoming an integral part of a networking infrastructure as opposed to something that is really built for convenience and casual use. This is particularly important as the new wireless standard built in 802.11n begin to emerge, as opposed to the past standards – 802.11a, and 802.11b/g. – 802.11n can now carry traffic comparable to your wired local area network speed, which is 100 megabits per second (Mbps) and above while enhancing the robustness and range of the wireless signal. So potentially users can actually leverage wireless access to access mission critical applications and access data which normally would be too bulky or too large to be downloaded through the legacy wireless technology. With 802.11n some organizations and enterprise may actually choose to bypass the wiring of the building and go completely wireless.

As this trend increases, we will continue to see customers source and fund the deployment of wired and wireless networks at the same time, vs. doing what they have traditionally done and  treating them separately. In this context, it would seem better for them to get the entire solution from a single vendor, preferably with unique value-added functionalities – It is. It might also seem that it would be better to have the entire solution developed by that vendor –  It’s not.

Vendors who would offer you their, and only their wares from end to end in the development of a local area network are not necessarily selling you the best products for your needs, but, potentially, products that meet the lowest requirements of the stated need at the highest margins for themselves.  The Brocade approach, on the other hand, is to continuously survey the landscape for the best available technology, regardless of the source, establish its interoperability with all of your various network components, build strong relationships with the vendors who supply it and deploy it at the best possible cost/performance ratio. This strategy is enabled by the fact that we do not need to subsidize other areas of the company by charging you more for portions of an end-to-end solution than the market demands, under the guise and per the assertion that, “If we make it all it must be the best.” In fact, we have an increasing number of customers who did buy into that, and who were greatly disappointed later, and who are now turning to us for a complete replacement of parts of, if not all of their network infrastructure.

While we are happy to help in that regard, we’d rather work with them to get it right the first time – selecting from best-of-breed vendors, working to ensure interoperability and availability in IP networks with the same intensive processes we always have in the data center, and extending our partnership beyond our technology partners and to the end users themselves.

Just wrapped up here at SNW where I shared our longer term vision for the data center, which includes FCoE and CEE-based products that will help customers consolidate the I/O sprawl that currently exists at the server edge to simplify operations and to increase efficiencies for emerging applications such as server virtualization. FCoE is a particularly effective technology for this and we believe this use case will result in the biggest payoff in terms of immediate  ROI and cost savings.

I was asked by a journalist if our announcement of the new FCoE switch and CNAs means we’ve changed our stance on FCoE adoption timeframes since we’ve been quite vocal and even critical of other vendors issuing FCoE products before the standard has been finalized. The Brocade position on standards has always been a complete commitment to building products that conform fully to the open industry standards and that's what we continue to do. The FCoE and CEE standards have stabilized to a point where we do not anticipate any major revisions to the technical specifications.

Our position on the emergence of FCoE has not changed; we are simply listening to our customers and introducing  new FCoE/CEE products now to allow them to begin early trials of the technology  in their test environments. Based on my extensive discussions with customers, partners and other industry experts, we still believe that customers will be  largely kicking the tires on FCoE through this year and into next year. We  expect adoption and deployments into production environments starting in earnest the later part of 2010 and accelerating in 2011. Whenever FCoE and CEE take off,  we are ready to help customers migrate to new technologies and architectures on their own timetable, not ours.