Brocade advances VCS Fabric Capabilities with Integrated Layer 2 Gateway for VMware NSX

Brocade today announced a new network virtualization gateway based on its industry-leading VCS Fabric technology that enables customers to bridge logical networks with physical resources to provide a unified data center architecture.

Server virtualization adoption continues at a rapid pace. However, the majority of workloads, storage devices and network services remain in the physical environment. As customers look to deploy the VMware NSX™ network virtualization platform, they must be able connect the virtual network with the physical assets in the data center. To address this need, Brocade has collaborated with VMware to integrate VMware NSX with industry-leading Brocade VCS Fabric technology to unify physical and virtual environments with the Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX.

At VMworld, the company is demonstrating the Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX in the Brocade booth (#1513) at the Moscone Convention Center. In addition, the company discussed the gateway at a session titled "Advanced Network Designs for Data Center Transformation".

The Brocade VDX switch family, running VCS Fabric technology, serves as the foundation for the new gateway. This robust solution can be deployed as a single switch or as a highly resilient fabric of switches that deliver the industry's best performance and availability.

"Today's introduction of the Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX advances the capabilities of our VCS Fabric technology by unifying physical and virtualized resources within the data center," said Jason Nolet, vice president, Data Center Networking, at Brocade. "The Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX provides our joint customers with an essential element for ensuring consistent and seamless connectivity between virtualized workloads and physical resources within the data center."

"Our collaboration with Brocade has resulted in an integrated solution that can deliver an agile, scalable network infrastructure," said Hatem Naguib, vice president, cloud networking and security, at VMware. "Brocade and VMware are helping customers integrate physical and virtual networks that can be viewed and managed as a single unified infrastructure. This will help customers radically simplify IT through a new network operations model."

The Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX offers a number of benefits for seamless transition from legacy to cloud-based architectures, including:

Gateway-level robustness allowing multiple Brocade VDX switches to be connected as one logical switch to support mission-critical applications and storage data.

A scalable, multitenant network virtualization environment.

Integrated VXLAN support within the Brocade VDX custom ASIC, delivering the highest-level gateway performance.

Conversion of tunnel connections into IP connections for bare metal servers running non-virtualized applications, physical storage devices or specialized hardware running network services.

As a proof of this concept, Brocade is demonstrating the Brocade VCS Gateway for VMware NSX with an EMC storage VNX series. "Brocade's innovation in integrating VXLAN with VCS fabrics addresses a critical component for enterprises wanting to adopt VMware NSX network virtualization while needing continued connectivity to physical servers, as well as IP storage systems such as those offered by EMC." said Paul Ross, vice president, Global Solutions, EMC Corporation. "The ability to integrate the physical storage environment with the virtual network will provide customers with an evolutionary migration to private and hybrid cloud infrastructures."