Cloud and managed services provider Interconnekt, along with sister companies ConnektNet and ConnektCloud, have upgraded their network with Brocade® (NASDAQ: BRCD) solutions to meet their “pay-as-you-grow” on-demand infrastructure requirements.
Delivered by distributor Avnet Technology Solutions, Brocade VDX® 6740 switches and Brocade NetIron® CER 2000 routers provide Interconnekt with a 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) network foundation. Additionally these devices enable rapid scaling of services to help Interconnekt accommodate substantial growth in demand from small-to-medium enterprise (SME) and mid-market customers well into the future.
Through its ConnektCloud offerings, Interconnekt offers a range of managed “as-a-service” offerings, including hosted server, desktop, backup and disaster recovery/business continuity, archive, storage, e-mail, voice and Web services, along with managed security and Microsoft 365 applications. To provide these offerings through its ConnektNet business unit, Interconnekt offers MPLS-based managed WAN connectivity across multiple access technologies, at speeds up to up to 10 Gbps. In fact, the demand for these services from SMEs and mid-market customers has been so strong that Interconnekt was at the point of nearly overwhelming the previous network it had installed just three years ago.
“Bandwidth demands have increased substantially year over year, and we’ve experienced considerable growth – particularly in connectivity, infrastructure-as-a-service, backup and data recovery offerings. We needed a lot more headroom for expansion, and this translated into greater reliability, scalability and flexibility. While continuing to ride the growth curve, we also wanted to equip ourselves for the future with much more intelligent, automated network capabilities,” said Jacob Kino, managing director of Interconnekt.
Kino added, “Customers in areas such as e-commerce and real-time financial trading need to scale their own services to meet peak demand. We need to be able to help them respond rapidly and flexibly, which is why network integration with our cloud orchestrator was a key criteria in selecting our new infrastructure.”
Kino said that it was important – in terms of implementing future capabilities – to source best-of-breed solutions from a single vendor. He said the Brocade solution was selected because of its adherence to open standards, cost-effectiveness and strong software-defined networking (SDN) roadmap.
“Plentiful connectivity and the economies of cloud computing are rapidly transforming the way small-to-medium enterprises in Australia go about provisioning IT capabilities,” said Greig Guy, Country Manager Australia and New Zealand, Brocade. “The solutions deployed by Interconnekt to stay ahead of the demand curve are deceptively simple – which is really a hallmark of Brocade – yet provide all the capabilities it needs to scale its business, while reducing operational cost right now. And, with SDN support built into the hardware, Interconnekt will be able to leverage emerging protocols such as VXLAN/NVGR to further increase network automation and flexibility.”
Interconnekt deployed the latest Brocade VDX 6740 Ethernet fabric switches within its data center to create a high-performance, low-latency, single-layer 10 GbE network fabric to support cloud computing operations. The new switches incorporate Brocade VCS® Fabric technology, which includes the VCS Gateway for VMware to enabled automated virtual machine mobility across the data center. The simplified Ethernet fabric deployment reflects a growing trend for fabric-based data center networks. According to Gartner, by the end of 2015, at least 25 percent of owners of midsize and large data centers will start modernizing their physical Ethernet switch networks into Ethernet fabrics.
Thanks to powerful auto-configuration capabilities, Brocade VDX switches create a self-forming, self-healing logical chassis that automatically discovers virtual machines on the network. Kino notes that the switches have been working perfectly at Interconnekt since they were first powered up.
Brocade NetIron CER 2000 Series compact Ethernet routers have also provided Interconnekt with a carrier-grade platform for provisioning Layer 2 and 3 virtual private networks (VPNs) and Internet access for customers. The routers enable the company to provision 1 and 10 GbE links using 50 percent less space than the previous routing platform while delivering nearly 40 times the routing performance.
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