Smart Data Centers Feature Editorial

(Editor's Note: This article refers to a video interview shot at Interop (News - Alert) 2010. To view TMCnet's entire library of videos from Interop and other industry shows, demonstrations and interviews in our in-house studio, visit our Video News home page.)

Recently at the Interop 2010 show in Las Vegas, TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani (News - Alert) interviewed Jason Nolet, vice-president of application delivery products from data center networking vendor Brocade (News - Alert) about the company's latest news.

At the show, Nolet said, the company announced something to help customers get greater control and visibility over their application performance in virtualized data centers and environments. He mentioned a new piece of software that's a member of their ServerIron ADX family, the BARB - Brocade Application

Resource Broker.  

Essentially what it does, according to information provided by Brocade, is provide visibility into application performance across network and VM infrastructures, and "ensure application service level agreements are met by dynamically allocating additional resources to service increases in application load." 

As Nolet explained it, the product lets users set up policies to monitor application performance, and if demand were spiking on an application, BARB lets the administrator "dynamically allocate" more resources to that application, to ensure that they can keep meeting SLA-level performance for that application.

And then when demand subsides, "those same resources which the Resource Broker had obtained, can then be freed for use by other applications." Nolet said the resource allocation can be done either manually or automatically, according to preset policies.

The real benefit to the customer, Nolet said, is that "historically, IT shops have had to overprovision capacity for applications, as a way of ensuring that when demand spikes, that they meet their SLAs."

So the beauty of the Application Resource Broker, Nolet said, is that it allows demand and capacity to be matched.