Brocade Boasts Bigger 10GE

Brocade Communications Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: BRCD) is announcing a couple of switching advancements Wednesday and while neither is all that radical, both show the vendor upping its game in key competitive areas.

Both products are likely to be highlights of Brocade’s analyst day, being held Wednesday at its San Jose, Calif. headquarters.

Bigger fabric
For data-center fabrics, Brocade is introducing the VDX 8770 Switch, a larger, modular version of the VDXs already shipping. (Brocade has been referring to the new box as Project Mercury.)

Each blade can support 48 ports of 10Gbit/s Ethernet, for a total of 384 in the eight-slot configuration. Brocade says the box has switch-fabric capacity for all that traffic; in fact, the box is built with 100Gbit/s ports in mind, but those interfaces are in Brocade’s plans for late 2013, says Premal Savla, a Brocade senior product manager.

Brocade’s VDX, which the company claims has more than 700 customers, is competing with other data-center fabric options, among them, FabricPath from Cisco Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: CSCO) and the QFabric from Juniper Networks Inc. (NYSE: JNPR). (“Fabric” in this case refers to the data center’s arrangement of switches, not the chip inside the switches.)

Brocade calls its fabric Brocade One, and like FabricPath, it’s based on the Trill protocol. Avaya Inc. pitches a fabric based on another protocol called Shortest Path Bridging. And while Juniper hasn’t detailed the innards of QFabric, there’s recent speculation that it runs on a variation of Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) .