Brocade Opens Up Cloud-Optimized App Delivery Switches
Friday, February 3rd, 2012Brocade and Cisco are making a big splash in cloud-optimized switches this week. While Cisco is pushing 100-gigabit Ethernet capabilities to its switch portfolio, Brocade is rolling out advancements to its ServerIron ADX series of cloud-optimized application delivery switches.
Dubbed OpenScript, ADX now offers an open platform that paves the way for intelligent predictions of network impacts before developers introduce scripts into production. OpenScript is built on Perl, a standards-based programming language, and allows ADX customers to customize service delivery to drive performance and scalability improvements.
“Brocade has been dancing around the application delivery controller space for years — since they acquired Foundry. F5 has been the run away leader in that market for some time,” said Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research.
“Brocade’s core competency was historically on the network side while Foundry was always focused on performance. The traditional app delivery space went more down a path where application prowess started being more than pure horsepower and raw speed, which was Foundry’s strength.”
Critical Customization
With its latest innovation, Brocade is showing that it understands how critical service customization and traffic manipulation are for businesses as they move to deliver cloud-based services. The OpenScript engine promises network operators the freedom they need to deploy custom capabilities to meet their individualized needs.
And the Brocade OpenScript Performance Estimator lets network operators estimate the performance impact of custom scripts before implementing them in live production environments. That opens the door for more accurate service capacity requirement planning. Customers are responding positively to the new version.
“Application delivery performance, scalability and flexibility are critical requirements for our customers. These requirements have a direct effect on our ability to scale our business while exceeding customer expectations,” said Rob Jackson, solution line leader for networking and security at Rackspace.
Jackson said the ADX solution would let Rackspace implement “stable,…
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