Brocade Offers Network As A Service

Companies can now purchase their networking infrastructure as and when they need it, according to Brocade – which has started selling networks ‘as a service’.

Brocade’s new subscription-based pricing structure for network infrastructure lets companies grow their networks as the company expands, instead of ploughing hefty upfront investments into a complete networking infrastructure, the company says.

Network As A Service

“Brocade Network Subscription is optimised to address the unique requirements of cloud-based IT environments and represents a viable new procurement alternative that offers customers the most flexible, open-ended network acquisition option available today,” said the company.

The way it works is that, with Brocade Network Subscription, customers can scale up and down according to actual network utilisation, “with minimal risk and no capital outlay”. According to Brocade, customers pay for their network infrastructure on a monthly basis, which provides organisations with the flexibility to align the actual usage with their network capacity, which Brocade says reduces costs and mitigates capital risk.

Also customers are no longer tied into any one particular networking technology, but can refresh their network technology outside of traditional purchase cycles.

“The challenge facing IT organisations today is that new technologies, such as cloud computing, are coming to the fore and are making it much more difficult to project and predict workloads,” said Joe Pucciarell of analyst house IDC. “A flexible acquisition option like Brocade Network Subscription enables organisations to add and reconfigure resources in a much more compacted time frame.”

And it seems that the new flexible subscription-based offering is proving popular, with Rackspace Hosting using Brocade Network Subscription to quickly bring new services to market.

Agile Infrastructure

Brocade’s move is a clever one as it aligns very closely with organisations moving to the cloud. Typically these organisations need a more agile infrastructure model that the Brocade option can satisfy.

“As a leader in networking solutions that support virtualisation and cloud optimisation, we are pushing the innovation envelope on both the technical and business front,” said John McHugh, CMO of Brocade.

“Brocade Network Subscription is the ‘virtualisation’ model for infrastructure procurement. With Brocade Network Subscription, customers can turn on vast amounts of networking capacity, from high-end routers to wiring closet switches, without any upfront capital costs,” he added.

“The monthly subscription is a small portion of what the purchase costs have been historically. Just like application virtualisation, this innovative approach allows organisations to acquire network capacity with little risk, while helping them scale up and scale down in line with their month-to-month needs.”

Other Announcements

Meanwhile Brocade has announced new additions to its Ethernet fabric portfolio, which it says increases scalability, improves virtual machine (VM) awareness, and further simplifies management and significantly reduce operational overhead.

It has also released a new Brocade VDX 6730 Data Centre Switch, and a new Brocade VDX 6710 Data Centre Switch.

The networking specialist has also announced significant advancements to the Brocade CloudPlex architecture with new Brocade Virtual Compute Blocks. These bundled solutions consist of integrated, tested and validated multivendor server, virtualisation, networking and storage resources.