Data Centers Featured Article

Brocade has put in some stretch to the Brocade (News - Alert) ServerIron ADX Series of Application Delivery Controllers with enhancements to help organizations realize the promise of on-demand, elastic data center computing. Elastic computing uses existing processing resources on existing sources to meet application demands without investing in additional hardware.

Here are the key features:

*The Brocade Application Resource Broker

The Brocade Application Resource Broker is a new software application that gives administrators increased visibility into application performance in virtualized data centers and private clouds, as well as on-demand provisioning and de-provisioning of application resources based on user demand. It offers a rich set of monitoring, decision-making and application-centric reporting features delivered as a plug-in for the VMware vSphere administrative interface.

By leveraging the application performance metrics from the Brocade ServerIron ADX, combined with server and VM-specific load statistics from VMware vCenter Server, the Brocade Application Resource Broker determines in real-time if application resources are meeting user demand. Using its policy-based decision engine, the Application Resource Broker can log events and alert administrators to potentially inadequate application resources. Using those same policies, it can automatically provision additional application VM instances and application delivery controller resources to service user demand, and de-provision the VM instances and resources when demand subsides.

“For large organizations requiring dynamic network capacity in their VMware production environments, a solution like the Brocade Application Resource Broker can help network administrators automate the usage of virtual IT application resources,” said Zeus Kerravala, senior vice president, global enterprise and consumer research, Yankee Group (News - Alert). “This functionality helps alleviate administrator intervention and identify real-time application performance to improve the ability to deliver on SLAs and help increase efficiency.”

* ServerIron ADX software release v12.2

ServerIron ADX software release v12.2 helps enterprises and service providers take advantage of IPv6-to-IPv4 gateway functionality. This is for application delivery to IPv6 clients, Layer 7 switching and application delivery services for the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) protocol, and predictive load balancing functionality based on real-time application performance measurements.

*Brocade ServerIron ADX 1008-1

The Brocade ServerIron ADX 1008-1 model adds an entry-level platform to the ServerIron ADX 1000 Series. Leveraging this new 1U platform and capacity on-demand, organizations can now deploy the Brocade ServerIron ADX 1008-1 and upgrade system capacity and feature set as their business grows, without the need for any hardware upgrades. It uses simple software-based license keys to double or quadruple performance, enable additional Ethernet interfaces, or activate features such as SSL offload and global server load balancing.

“According to independent third party testing, the Brocade ServerIron ADX Series of application delivery controllers has established Brocade as a performance leader in the application delivery market,” said Jason Nolet, vice president, Application Delivery Products Division, Brocade. “Now, Brocade is enabling application delivery for virtualized data centers and private clouds through innovations in capacity on-demand and the Brocade Application Resource Broker. These new capabilities directly address the customer's need for a more agile and dynamic data center, optimizing network and application resources based on user demand.”