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.

I was recently talking to a large retailer about how much IT infrastructure is wasted because they have to build to handle peak loads around the holidays. The percentages are staggering. Some retailers estimate that more than 50 percent of their infrastructure is built for these peak loads. Just imagine the cost savings if they could dynamically add resources during those peak periods.

While cloud bursting is often talked about in this context, I wonder if we will burst the cloud as every retailer vies for additional resources in the cloud at the same time. So, the question is “What can be done before enacting a full hybrid cloud model?”

A beginning step could be to redeploy resources in the data center to the production applications and away from the development during those peak loads. To support this type of resource redeployment, we will have to enable a broader range of virtual machine mobility than exists today. And, to do that, we will need to build larger, flatter Layer 2 networks than what currently technologies such as Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) will realistically allow.

Historically, data center networks have been deployed in an hierarchical, multitier fashion:
•    Layer 2 terminated at the edge or in the access layer, for good reasons (apropos of my previous blog)
•    Layer 3 at the distribution/aggregation layer
•    Core routing protocols in the next layers of network infrastructure

This hierarchical, multitier approach has been the most prevalent and widely accepted way of designing, deploying, and managing data center networks.

While this approach provides the benefits of not having to deal with STP (for the most part), it imposes different challenges for the engineering and administration teams. First, this can be an expensive architecture as you continue to grow your data center network. One of the main reasons for this is that routing ports are more expensive than Layer 2 switching ports. It costs vendors more to build them and therefore more for customers to purchase them.

More compelling than the additional capital cost, however, is the ongoing operational expenditure of introducing Layer 3 in the edge/access layer as it complicates network design, deployment, administration, and monitoring. Complexity equals ongoing administrative costs. For instance, each port in this hierarchical network can be running a number of finicky protocols, each with its own idiosyncrasies and associated best practices that have two negative impacts on modern data centers:

1. First, this increases the number of management touch points, resulting in more administration required.
2. Second, it makes adding on-demand capacity a non-trivial, very carefully planned and choreographed exercise. This limits the viability of building a truly dynamic data center, which is a cornerstone of private clouds and virtualized data centers.

The virtualized data center is one that requires an agile service delivery model, the ability to add network capacity and services on demand, and new levels of operational simplicity in network deployment, administration, and monitoring. It is no coincidence then that the notion of scaling out flatter Layer 2 networks resonates with network architects.

If IT organizations can create these flat Layer 2 networks with loop-free topologies, lightning-fast reconvergence times, and extremely efficient use of bandwidth, the virtualized workloads will have a much larger range of mobility in the data center (remember, server virtualization clusters terminate at Layer 2 boundaries). Additionally, since converged storage traffic such as FCoE is not routable over IP, a larger Layer 2 domain provides a larger domain for storage access—where hundreds if not thousands of physical machines can access shared storage in a reliable and efficient manner.

Brocade is striving to bring precisely these values to the virtualized data center. In my next blog, we will investigate the requirements posed by converged storage traffic and the value that these flat Layer 2 networks provide for shared storage access to servers in this new virtualized cloud data center.