Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

BLADE Network Technologies, Inc.,  a company for data center networking, announced that its VMready capable Ethernet switches can now manage thousands of Virtual Machines or VMs across massively scalable data center networks.

VMready is a solution that enables the network to be Virtual Machine aware. The network can be configured and managed for 1000s of virtual ports or v-ports, rather than just a few physical ports.

With VMready, as VMs migrate across physical hosts, so do their network attributes. VMready allows managing virtual machines as they can be added, moved and removed while retaining the same ACLs, QoS and VLAN attributes. VMready allows for a 'define once, use many' configuration that evolves as the server and network topologies evolve.

VMready works with all virtualization products, including VMware, Microsoft's (News - Alert) Hyper-V, Xen and KVM, without modification of Virtual Machine Hypervisors or Guest operating systems.

BLADE's VMready with its unique NMotion capability is the VM mobility solution that detects VM migrations as they occur, across all vSphere license levels, and works on physical switches without proprietary packet tagging.

"Virtual machine mobility is an important tool for optimizing data center performance, availability and efficiency," stated Joe Skorupa, research vice president, Networking and Communications, Data Center, Gartner (News - Alert).

"However, to ensure consistent performance and security, network connectivity and policies must automatically migrate with the VMs," Skorupa added.

BLADE's VMready addresses the issues of scalability, vendor lock-in, need to purchase a replacement virtual switch and infrastructure disruption. BLADE VMready automatically preserves security, performance and access policies as VMs migrate across data centers. Used with Layer 2 tunneling, and BLADEHarmony Manager 5.0, VMready allows VMs to migrate across and between data centers in a Layer 2 network with 100,000 or more VMs.

BLADE Network Technologies and Juniper Networks (News - Alert) demonstrated VMready's ability to migrate VMs and move their associated network policies automatically between data centers using BLADE RackSwitch G8124 and a secure, standards-based Juniper core network that delivers low latency.

BLADE also announced the "pure play" Converged Enhanced Ethernet (CEE) top-of-rack switch. BLADE's RackSwitch™ G8124 now includes new lossless CEE enhancements with BLADEOS 6.3 for high-performance IP storage and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE).

"BLADE Network Technologies believes 2010 will be the year of the VM-aware network as enterprises move to revamp their data centers to prepare for massive virtualization," explains Tim Shaughnessy, vice president of Marketing, BLADE Network Technologies.

"Networking vendors are taking vastly different approaches to equipping data center networks for the demands of virtualization. BLADE uniquely offers data centers a new, open and automated solution, that doesn't consume server overhead, slow down network performance, require proprietary packet tagging that works only in VMware environments or necessitate an expensive overhaul of existing VMware environments," Shaughnessy adds.

"Customers building private cloud environments depend on networking solutions that are optimized for virtualization," says Parag Patel, vice president, alliances, VMware. "VMready integrates with VMware vCenter Server, enabling customers to configure the network configurations of virtual machines on both VMware vSphere vSwitches and physical VMready switches to help ensure network security, quality of service and proper configurations are implemented to increase efficiency, performance and reliability."