Brocade^® (NASDAQ: BRCD)  announced the industry’s first true Ethernet fabric switching solutions that are purpose-built for highly virtualized and cloud-optimized data centers. As the global leader in data center fabric innovation and deployment, Brocade now leads the industry in the development and delivery of Ethernet fabrics.

 The Brocade VDX™ 6720 Data Center Switches are a new family of 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) offerings that revolutionize Layer 2 Ethernet networking to create the first true Ethernet fabrics. The switches eliminate the need for Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), collapsing the access and aggregation networking layers to create a flat, multipath, deterministic network that is ideal for virtualized environments. This approach provides virtual machines (VMs) a greater sphere of mobility, increases network utilization, creates more resilient networks and simplifies the management of data center networks. 

The Brocade VDX 6720 Data Center Switches are available in one- or two-rack-unit (1U or 2U) form factors and provide the ability to scale from 16 to 60 ports with pay-as-you-grow Ports on Demand (POD) licensing. The switches provide full 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) wire-speed performance from any port to any port, with latency of 600 nanoseconds (ns). The switches are based on low-latency, lossless, 10 Gbps Data Center Bridging (DCB) technology and are capable of running all types of data and storage traffic –including traditional IP, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). The Brocade VDX 6720 switches protect customers’ existing investments by supporting their current server, hypervisor and storage choices, and by seamlessly interfacing with existing network infrastructures.