Brocade ServerIron ADX 4000 ASM-4 bundle

An extension to the Brocade ServerIron ADX 4000 for mid-market enterprises, the ASM-4 bundle is an entry-level chassis that provides Layer 4-7 switching performance to assist those using virtualisation and cloud computing to optimise on-demand, automated data centre computing.

With licence-activated, capacity-on-demand scalability, the bundle provides eight ports of 1 Gbps small form-factor pluggable (SFP) copper connectivity, with the option to use fibre SFPs on all ports. Performance is claimed to be enhanced via a robust services platform with built-in extensibility and interoperability across fabrics and networking protocols.

The Brocade Application Resource Broker software module provides visibility into application performance across the network and virtual machine (VM) infrastructures. It helps ensure that application service level agreements (SLAs) are met by allocating additional resources to address increases in application load. The software module enables: real-time monitoring, measurement, correlation and application-centric reporting through the vSphere administrative interface via a client plug-in; on-demand, automated, policy-based provisioning and de-provisioning of resources based on application performance metrics from the ServerIron ADX and the VMware vCentre server; historical tracking and trending of key application performance metrics to reveal changing requirements.

To address the increasing complexity of server virtualisation, the Virtual Cluster Switching (VCS) technology enables customers to build and manage data centre fabrics that can efficiently consolidate and manage tens of thousands of VMs, eliminating challenges resulting from spanning tree protocol-based networks.