Brocade has announced three new data centre switches – SLX 9140, SLX 9240 and SLX 9540, as part of an expanded Brocade SLX family , that feature network visibility and the addition of Brocade Workflow Composer Automation Suites for turnkey automation.
Yarob Sakhnini, Regional Director, MEMA at Brocade says, “As organisations continue to transform their business and adapt to new digital workloads, IT operations teams struggle to keep pace with the volume and variety of data going across their networks. In order to meet customer and end-user service and application expectations and remain competitive, organisations need to provide service and application assurance, improve operational efficiencies, and in some cases, enable new monetisation opportunities. To accomplish this, they need comprehensive visibility into the operational state of the network and into the traffic that is transiting the network.”
“Brocade SLX family is the industry’s first data centre networking portfolio to deliver agility at all layers of the data centre stack, while being open to provide customers with choice. With Brocade, organisations can build networks that allow them to quickly adapt to technology transitions, deliver new services at cloud speed and accelerate digital transformation.”
By embedding network visibility on every router and switch, organisations can achieve pervasive visibility throughout the network to quickly identify problems, accelerate mean-time-to-remediation and improve overall service levels. The Brocade SLX 9140 and 9240 extend these capabilities with a programmable ASIC that provides Visibility Services from the physical wire to virtual networks and workloads.
Brocade SLX Insight Architecture and Brocade SLX Visibility Services deliver a new approach to network monitoring and troubleshooting that makes it faster, easier, and more cost-effective to get the comprehensive, real-time visibility needed for network operations and automation. This innovative approach provides comprehensive visibility from the network to the workload including the ability to address end-user application or service needs, analyse, automate, and generate reports on context-rich data, and provide the fine-grain targeted visibility needed to tune the network for specific device or service needs.
New automation suites, including Network Essentials, Data Centre Fabrics and Internet Exchange Points for the Brocade Workflow Composer platform, powered by StackStorm, provide automated network provisioning, validation, troubleshooting and remediation workflows. These automation suites are ideal for customers who want to jumpstart their automation journey with pre-built workflows to accelerate time-to-value. Introduced earlier this year, Brocade Workflow Composer is a server-based, DevOps-style network automation platform that integrates across IT domains for end-to-end workflow automation.
According to IDC, two-thirds of CEOs at Global 2000 companies will place digital transformation at the centre of their corporate strategies by the end of 2017. CEOs recognise they must become a digital organisation to accelerate the pace of innovation and drive competitive advantage or risk being displaced by more nimble competitors. Fast innovation can only happen with an agile IT foundation where automation works seamlessly with network visibility while digitally connecting all IT domains and functions together to eliminate silos and deliver end-to-end automation.
“Organisations that are going through digital transformation need networks that are extremely agile, extensively automated and highly visible,” said Jason Nolet, senior vice president, Switching, Routing and Analytics Products Group, Brocade. “Brocade is delivering the breadth and depth of flexibility and agility that sets us apart from other network providers. We do so vertically across the data centre stack, and horizontally across domains within the data centre—while being open at every layer.”
Brocade SLX family advancements
- The new Brocade SLX 9140 leaf switch provides native 48×25 GbE server-facing ports and 6×100 GbE ports in a 1U fixed form factor. It also features flexible 1/10/25/40/100 GbE configuration options.
- The new Brocade SLX 9240 spine switch delivers high density 32×100 GbE ports in a 1U fixed form factor.
- Both the Brocade SLX 9140 and SLX 9240 switches feature the first programmable ASIC in their class of switch enabling Brocade to rapidly deliver new capabilities via software. This eliminates expensive forklift upgrades for customers when new technologies and protocols are introduced into the environment. The ASIC builds on the Brocade SLX Insight Architecture, an open kernel-based virtual machine (KVM) environment to run third-party and customer-specific monitoring, troubleshooting and analytics applications, by adding Visibility Services to provide insight into virtual networks and workloads. Actions can be taken within the switch or through applications and tools outside of the switch, such as Splunk or Brocade Workflow Composer.
- The Brocade SLX 9540 switch delivers carrier-class features in a cost-effective 1 RU fixed form factor optimised for data centre interconnect, WAN edge and Internet exchange point deployments. It offers 48×10 GbE ports and 6×100 GbE ports.
Brocade Workflow Composer automation suites
Designed to run with the Brocade Workflow Composer platform, Brocade automation suites are ideal for IT organisations seeking to embrace automation but have limited automation development skills and resources. The suites provide out-of-box network lifecycle automation for commonly performed tasks and are packaged to address major use cases. Each automation suite includes documentation and a collection of turnkey, yet customisable workflows, services, sensors, actions, and rules. Customers can use Brocade automation suites as is or as starter kits for building or customising workflows specific to their data centre requirements to reduce time-to-value.
Availability
The Brocade SLX 9140 and SLX 9240 are currently planned to be orderable in January 2017. The Brocade SLX 9540 is orderable today. All switches are planned to be generally available in April 2017. Brocade Workflow Composer is generally available today. The new automation suites will be available for preview in December 2016 with general availability planned for February 2017.
