Here is the video of me at Brocade Technology Day unveiling details of Brocade One, the new unifying networking vision and strategy. For more information, visit: www.brocade.com/brocadeone.

Here is the video of me at Brocade Technology Day discussing new innovations and technologies necessary for the migration to a fully virtualized data center. For more information, visit: www.brocade.com/brocadeone.

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?

In March, a nor'easter came roaring up the U.S. East Coast knocking down trees, taking out power and forcing many residents in NY, NJ and CT to boil their drinking water. When the power went out in my home around six pm, the backup power unit kicked in to keep the cable modem alive, the laptops shifted from AC to internal batteries and the Internet died.

With all the precautions taken, our desktops and laptops were stranded. No Web sites, no IP phones, no streaming movies. Virtual bricks so to speak. However, a light was shining as the sun set. That light was coming from my smartphone. While restaurants and coffee bars in my town were closing, the applications and the signal bars on my phone were still open for business. The “G” in 3G was saying “GO” not “GONE.”

According to Infonetics Research, the number of mobile broadband subscribers surpassed DSL subscribers for the first time in 2009, and is forecast to grow to 1.5 billion worldwide in 2014. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Mobile broadband is primarily a “personal” connection while wire-line broadband is a “premises” connection.

In my home, I have computers, gaming consoles and media players sharing a cable modem. In the same home there are three 3G phones. My home has one broadband connection provided by the cable company, and each 3G phone has one provided by the mobile provider. That 3 (mobile) to 1 (home) ratio is not uncommon—and in many homes it’s even higher.

The move to mobile broadband is being encouraged further by the ability to purchase portable hotspots. These handheld devices (and soon phones) combine 3G and 4G access with Wi-Fi, enabling up to five devices to share a mobile broadband connection.

An FCC broadband survey conducted in late 2009 reveals that 15 percent of all Americans use wireless broadband with a computer today, and that number is also expected to grow rapidly. The move towards tablet computers with mobile broadband capabilities will further increase the number of mobile connections and demand for richer content.

In developing nations, wireless is projected to be the dominate Internet connection. For example, as Haiti rebuilds from a devastating earthquake, the country is considering rebuilding its broadband infrastructure on the back of mobile technology.

By some estimates, each smartphone consumes as much data as 30 traditional cellphones. And when you add mobile broadband-connected laptops, netbooks and tablets, that number can jump to as high as 450. The anytime, anywhere nature of mobile access, combined with the rollout of higher-performing WiMAX and LTE networks, will continue to reshape the application and content expectations of consumers and businesses alike.

In the end, it’s all about managing more data. Mobile technology provides another Internet access point, which in turn increases network connections, which drives up the number of users, who demand sophisticated applications and richer content, which requires more bandwidth, which increases demand on IT resources, which forces IT infrastructure to scale and adjust or collapse. In a world where the user is always on the “GO,” services can never be “GONE.”

At Brocade, we are keenly aware of this rapidly emerging phenomenon. Our next-generation technology combines years of experience in carrier networking and application delivery as well as a tradition of bet-your-business data center networking. This is a wining trifecta in the race to enable virtual infrastructure. More importantly, we understand why a single-transport infrastructure with rich application-aware services will become integral to managing client connections, applications, workload, server mobility and storage. The virtual infrastructure will derive its utility from the agile network.

Less will become more as people drop the wire and go wireless with mobile broadband. As a result, more data centers will move from yesterday’s infrastructure architectures and into tomorrow’s cloud architectures. So a nor’easter of sorts is beginning to blow through data centers around the world. This storm is not originating from the Atlantic but rather the coast of the mobile network. And these counter-clockwise winds are driving user demand into data centers in ways we’ve never seen before.

All of which makes you wonder: Is your infrastructure ready for the impending storm?

As expected, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) this week submitted its proposal to Congress outlining a plan to increase the quality and the quantity of broadband connections here in the United States. By doing so, the United States is following on the heels of countries such as Singapore and Australia who have already adopted national broadband plans to increase broadband usage in their countries.

As a CEO of a networking company, my position on the broadband plan is not as clear as it might seem. There is no doubt that I would view any plan that increases the use of networking technologies and possibly accelerates the upgrade cycles of networking hardware and software as a good thing. However, some of my best customers, particularly those in the service provider industry, may have some serious reservations and concerns about further regulation of their business by the federal government. I must weigh both views in formulating my own opinions.

But, putting aside commercial interests, I believe that this is the time for the private sector to partner with the public sector to help not only create a national plan for broadband but to put the plan into motion. In addition, I believe there are at least two other areas that the private and public sectors can partner on (specifically in corporate tax and educations reforms) that will help keep the United States as the world’s leader in innovation, a position that is arguably more tenuous than it has been in more than 150 years.

This was the basis of a recent speech I delivered to an audience full of fellow CEOs and captains-of-industry. In it, I outlined a three-step proposal that the US should adopt to keep our competitive edge especially compared to countries in emerging regions that are less burdened with legacy technology infrastructures and regulatory structures than we are. Specifically, I called for action on these three areas:

• One, work with the federal government and develop a sensible national broadband plan.
• Two, introduce comprehensive corporate tax reforms that will result in more US exports of technology and encourage more R&D investments.
• Three, increase our investment in educating our students in math and sciences through whatever means including overhauling our arcane public education system.

I have posted a complete copy of the presentation with notes below. You can download the full file by clicking on the icon. I would greatly appreciate to hear back from you with your thoughts – good, bad or indifferent – on my proposal. I hope to inspire a healthy dialogue on the three areas of action and to foster collaboration among businesses and the federal government to help get the U.S. recapture its history of innovation and economic leadership.

Thank you,

Mike

It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday night and the regular crowd is standing in line at the coffee shop ordering lattes, Frappuccinos and mochas. I’m here, but I’m not supposed to be here. Normally, I’d be on the other side of the country, but my flight was canceled due to inclement weather. Between the heavy rain in the West and the heavy snow in the East, my scheduled flight, well, couldn’t fly.

All this precipitation started me thinking about how we look to the formation of clouds for answers to questions about the weather—and how companies looking to deliver services from the Clouds also ask about Whether.

I started fielding “Whether” questions in the late 1990s. I guess you can say I became something of a Whetherman. Several months before the century gave way to the Y2K issue, I left behind years of technology management on Wall Street and joined a start-up company based in Waltham, Massachusetts. The premise behind StorageNetworks was simple: deliver storage as a service over a “wire.” Our customers would subscribe to capacity that would be delivered (provisioned) within the constraints of an SLA. The model worked and many companies (large and small) leveraged the service to meet the growing data demands of the dot-com era.

StorageNetworks essentially provided a cloud service. We didn’t call it cloud at the time, but that’s what it was. We owned the assets and provisioned parcels of storage to customers who in many cases shared common infrastructure. We provided storage services from public and private data centers. We met with companies ranging in size from dot-com start-ups to established enterprises. There was little doubt we could deliver cloud storage. Actually, the responses mostly ranged from excitement to curiosity. But, in the same way a low cloud ceiling keeps planes on the tarmac, Whether kept many customers from taking off into early cloud storage.

The customers always wondered Whether they should do it. Whether services would be responsive to their business needs. Whether the right levels of data security would be applied. Whether the infrastructure would be available 24×7×365. Whether subscribing to resources would keep them competitive. Whether the subscription model would truly reduce costs compared to an ownership model. Whether they were headed toward vendor lock-in. Whether they could trust it.

In the late 1990s the Internet was less than a decade old, cell phones called home instead of calling up home pages, a sales force was something you had (not something you used) and Twitter wasn’t tweeting. A lot has changed since then. The pervasiveness of cloud services today for consumers and professionals has reduced the resistance to placing digital assets beyond arm’s length. But the ubiquity of the cloud for end users has only raised more questions about Whether for those providing cloud services.

The bottom line is that end users expect applications to be available, period. No excuses. So providers have a wide range of Whether-related issues to contend with, such as:
• Whether they can handle an unanticipated deluge of requests
• Whether they can mitigate morphing security threats
• Whether they should expand infrastructure to support customer growth

• Whether the infrastructure is reliable enough to meet availability SLAs

For service providers this means building physical cloud infrastructures with the most reliable, efficient and high-performance technology.

When I was responsible for early public and private storage clouds, we leveraged Brocade technology to meet many of these Whether challenges. Today, the next generation of Brocade data center technologies is simplifying the boundaries between SAN, LAN and application delivery. These products are designed to meet the growing demands on physical infrastructure, virtualized infrastructure and applications. Our goal at Brocade is to help our customers think less about the Whether by providing them with the networking reliability and scalability to meet their business demands.

Well, it’s cloudy weather today in the Bay Area but, as I sit here in Starbucks with Wi-Fi and 3G, I have no doubt Whether it’s cloudy everywhere. Ah, you gotta love a hot latte and the Netflix instant play queue to make being stranded feel almost like home.

In my January blog I provided a high-level overview of the technology at Brocade’s new state-of-the-art San Jose campus. Now, I’d like to focus on a specific area of that infrastructure, one that’s critical to Brocade and to its customers: the network.

We began mapping our requirements about a year and a half ago. The goal was to design a high-speed, secure, scalable, and reliable IP network foundation – one that would deliver the right mix of functionality, performance, scalability, security, and cost savings. Wherever possible, we wanted to leverage our own capabilities and products.

In fact, the SAN and IP networks at the new campus will rely on Brocade products exclusively for the fast and reliable connectivity we need to serve the ever-growing demands of business applications. To limit downtime during data migration, Brocade will use its SAN/Fibre Channel products to complete an 8 Gbps Fibre Channel connection between the SAN infrastructures serving the current buildings and the new campus. Brocade NetIron XMR Series routers will link the existing and new IP networks at 20 Gbps of bandwidth with virtually no latency.

The network transport connecting the Brocade campus and vendor-neutral co-location facilities will travel over a dense Wavelength Division-Multiplexing (WDM) network with optical protection, for uninterrupted, high-bandwidth connectivity to the outside world. To provide best-in-class content delivery, we’ll use the Brocade ServerIron ADX platform.

WAN connectivity between Brocade and partner networks will leverage inexpensive Ethernet and allow us to connect directly to service providers and business partners with cost-effective, scalable bandwidth via co-location facilities. This gives us the flexibility to engage as needed, match capacity to demand, and pay as we go.

The network core and data center at the new campus will use Brocade NetIron MLX technology. Because our technology eliminates the need for the aggregation layer in a traditional network configuration, we can connect the network edge directly to the core. This will greatly reduce capital outlay and simplify operations. It also lessens requirements for space, power, and cooling for lower total cost of ownership.

We’ll further reduce our space, power, and cooling requirements in our wiring closets by installing Brocade FastIron CX access switches at the network edge. Essentially, we’re looking at every opportunity to do more at a lower overall cost, and to do it better.

Finally, we’re leveraging our OEM relationship with Motorola to build a next-generation Wireless LAN (WLAN) at the campus. Basically, the entire facility will be a Wi-Fi hotspot, which will help maximize productivity by allowing employees to seamlessly connect to business applications, regardless of their location on campus.

With just 10 weeks remaining until move-ins start, there’s still a lot to do. When it’s finished, the new campus will be served by a world-class converged IPv6-ready network offering a secure, scalable, and robust voice and data platform for assured rich multimedia content delivery. The network will serve VoIP, wireless, video, and Web services, and support future applications such as Fixed Mobile Convergence and Unified Communications (UC). We’re excited about our momentum, and I’m pleased to report that we’re on schedule.

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

Press Release

HostWay Facts

YouTube Video

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