Brocade’s recent appointment of Redington as its distributor for the SAARC region encompassing India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Maldives and Bhutan is significant because the data center market is growing at a robust pace in this region. Market researcher IDC predicts that the data center market in India alone will continue to grow at a CAGR of almost 35 per cent over the next two years.

Much of this growth will result from the business growth and expansion of large and medium enterprises across diverse industry sectors including Telecom, BFSI and Retail and Infrastructure.  The Telcos, for instance, will scale up their networks to offer 3G and other services. A number of leading banks, both in the private and public sector are on a branch expansion mode and many are experimenting on new product delivery on internet and mobile platforms. Infrastructure and retail sectors are also expected to scale up their business operations considerably over the next couple of years, hence the need for greater data center capacities and the growth in data center networks.

The growth in data center capacities will mean a corresponding growth in both structured and unstructured data on the networks which will eventually lead to increased complexity. Consequently, enterprises will have to look for new ways to manage the complexity and at the same time derive greater efficiencies out of their IT infrastructure. Moving forward, enterprises will be looking increasingly at virtualized infrastructure and highly optimized converged networks that not only deliver high performance but also bring benefits in terms of considerable cost reductions.

In such a scenario, Cloud Computing is the technology paradigm that has the potential to help IT departments get the most out of their networks.  While critics and pundits alike tend to question the readiness of Indian enterprises to adopt the cloud computing paradigm, there are ample signs to indicate that cloud computing services have many takers. A few players have already launched cloud services and many more are in the pipeline.

The other interesting development is that Indian enterprises, both large and mid-sized, are evincing keen interest in the private cloud computing model. Many organizations which have already made considerable investments in IT infrastructure are evaluating how they can create a cloud environment within their firewalls.

This is because private cloud helps an organization provision or de-provision IT as a service to its various departments depending on requirements and will even bill the departments for usage.  It is in this context that the Brocade One unified network architecture assumes significance. As enterprises in India transition to virtual environments and experiment with cloud computing models, they will require platforms and building blocks that take out the complexity and configurable. In addition, changes to the infrastructure have to be made in coordination with other data center resources such as storage and computing elements—effectively blurring the line between what have traditionally been silos of IT resources.

The tie-up with Redington is therefore prime as it uniquely positions Brocade in the SAARC region, reaching out to the most diverse and remote part of the region through Redington’s 15000 strong reseller network.

Wingspan Guest Blogger: Charles Charmatz, General Manager Network Services, Hostway Corporation        

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HostWay Facts

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These days, we hear a lot about cloud computing and how it's a massive shift from the traditional approach to a large-scale Internet-based service delivery environment. I'd like to shed some light on the technical aspects of this new model - hopefully providing some insight into the unique challenges we experience at Hostway.

From a basic infrastructure standpoint, not much has changed from the days of discrete hosting. The technological challenges in that arena have always been network reliability, power, cooling and scalability. The cloud model actually makes datacenter power delivery easier, as datacenter space experiences less churn while virtualization drives server consolidation. Server consolidation means less cooling is required and although density is higher, so is overall power efficiency.

The network, however, is radically different. In the datacenter, with multiple customers sharing the same hardware in most cases, a failed Ethernet port no longer means a single customer is offline. More than ever, absolute reliability is crucial. To this end, we now heavily rely on quality, rock-solid network devices and fast-acting, intelligent solutions to fault tolerance such as VSRP and Metro Ring Protocol in place of Spanning Tree.

Flexibility and scalability are just as important with the "have it your way, when you want it" nature of cloud hosting. Let's say a customer wants a number of instances, combined with a dedicated firewall and access to their portion of a shared iSCSI SAN. Not only must you have the flexibility to create this configuration, but the capacity to deliver it. Port density is very important in this environment.

Cloud hosting has also forced us to adjust our scope. No longer is a service restricted to a single datacenter or geography. The network must be able to reach further out to the consumer while providing overlay services, similar to CDN. In our case, this meant deploying our own multiservice transit network, capable of bringing our customers' data right to the edge while also bringing our datacenters closer together.

We chose to build our transit network on MPLS, with both IPv4 and IPv6. Traditionally a heavyweight technology, MPLS implementations are now mature, optimized and provide some very powerful advantages for large networks.

Our platform of choice is the NetIron XMR, which has density and configurability that allows us to deploy a much simpler POP. Wire-speed routing and switching on ports up to 10 gigabit Ethernet enable us to fend off DDoS attacks and handle unexpected surges in demand with grace. Just a few years ago, the same capability would have required a multitude of vendors and power-hungry devices.

It's been quite a journey the past few years and we're still evolving, but I'm excited to see where cloud computing takes us, both as an engineer and an Internet user.

Products Deployed:

Brocade NetIron XMR

Brocade FastIron Edge X-series

Brocade FastIron GS series

Brocade BigIron RX