Brocade-HyperEdge -The effortless IP networks

POSITIONING PAPER

The Effortless Network: HyperEdge Technology for the Campus LAN The Brocade One® strategy represents a smooth transition to a world where information and applications reside anywhere in the cloud. Customers use the campus LAN as the portal to the data center cloud, and The Effortless Network™ is the Brocade vision for the future of the campus LAN. Based on the foundation of Brocade® HyperEdge™ technology, The Effortless Network simplifies network architecture and automates configuration and management tasks, while providing enterprise-grade flexibility, security, and scalability for wired and wireless access. Unlike competitive approaches, The Effortless Network avoids the trap of over-engineered, over-priced, and hard-to-manage campus networks. It is designed to meet the requirements of the most demanding applications with a network that keeps running, no matter what.

New Applications Add New Stresses Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) leverages server virtualization to reduce the cost and complexity of desktop application support, application upgrades, data management, and data security. While VDI addresses desktop application problems including upgrades, patching, and security of desktop data, it also creates new challenges for the campus LAN. User mouse clicks, typing, and screen refreshes have to move from the local device to the virtual machine hosting the desktop, and back again. The impact in the campus is higher bandwidth, lower latency, and always-up availability.

As end-user devices increase performance at the speed of Moore’s Law, user expectations increase just as fast. Nowhere is the expectation gap more evident than with video. Today, users expect real-time access to streaming video for corporate training, executive briefings, and even when conducting meetings with remote customers. This “video-on-demand” expectation requires the campus network to deliver higher bandwidth with low latency and jitter.

Enterprises are experiencing a historic transition in how employees communicate. Previously, voice, e-mail, instant messaging, and video conferencing were deployed with separate applications, used different devices, and often had independent networks. Today, Unified Communications (UC) brings all forms of communication to a single device—a desktop/laptop computer, tablet, iPad, or smartphone—delivering real-time collaboration. Human collaboration is dynamic. For example, a low-bandwidth text message can instantly transform into a shared desktop with joint editing of documents, and—with a mouse click—can expand to a video chat before disappearing again at the end of the collaboration. The campus network has to scale, ensure consistent security policies, and provide low latency and jitter while maintaining continuous uptime.

The Effortless Network: HyperEdge Technology for the Campus LAN 2 of 8

The explosion of smartphones, tablet computers, and iPads sets a user expectation that access to the data, applications, and social networks they rely on in their personal lives will be available when they are at work. Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) has a positive impact on IT budgets when users purchase and maintain their own devices, yet it creates concerns about securing wireless access to sensitive corporate data. User expectations of seamless access require consistently applied security policies across both wired and wireless LAN segments.

Figure 1. Impact of BYOD on campus LAN.

Friction Points: Business Expectations Confront Campus Realities Every network in the enterprise, whether it is the data center or the campus, must be designed to meet business expectations that are balanced with technology choices. This has not been easy, with IT budgets shrinking while applications, data, and user devices have continued to grow rapidly—even during the recent recession.

The cost of running the campus network is out of control in many organizations. Gartner estimates that companies spend 17 percent of their total IT budget (CapEx plus OpEx) on their networks. In 2011, more than half of the operating expense was devoted to maintaining the campus network. Gartner also found that companies who had a single vendor procurement strategy for the campus incurred a 25 percent premium in total cost of ownership over a five-year period. This adds up to an average cost of $1,400 per person per year for campus networks—clearly a major investment. For this reason, focused actions that reduce the cost of the campus LAN are a top strategic objective at many companies.


A survey of Fortune 1000 enterprise network administrators (taken by InfoPro) identified the following top four pain points for companies operating a campus network:

1. Keeping up with technology 2. Capacity planning 3. Reliability and performance 4. Managing growth

The root cause of this pain is complexity. Campus networks originally provided a connection from desktop computers to file/print servers or connected desktop clients to servers hosting back office applications. Today, Unified Communications, virtual desktop infrastructure, streaming video, and Web 2.0 applications clearly create complex traffic flows. The campus LAN has to ensure device access is secure, as well as having to scale with the increased use of rich media, including peer-to-peer video conferences and video chat. It also has to handle the wide range of data streams created when collaborating with Unified Communications applications.

Increasingly, work happens at any time and any place an employee chooses. It is common for employees to use several devices during the day: a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet computer, an iPad, and a smartphone. Employees expect the freedom to choose the device that best meets their needs with unfettered access to applications and data. This is causing an explosion in wireless traffic in the campus, which creates new traffic patterns while requiring more bandwidth. To keep up, administrators need unified management across wired and wireless segments. In particular, security policies need to be consistent and simple to administer.

Where Is the Innovation? Clearly, there is a need for innovation in the campus network. New applications, device mobility, and the positive impact on the bottom line of seamless collaboration between workers, suppliers, and customers is happening much more quickly than the traditional campus network is able to evolve.

Gartner points out, however, that for the past 20 years there has been little innovation in the enterprise network. Venture capital investment—a measure of innovation—has drastically dropped from a high in 2000 of $11 billion to less than $1 billion in 2011. Combined with the fact that the leaders in campus networking, both at the high and low end of the market, have not made significant investments beyond incremental “speed and feed” enhancements, it becomes clear why innovation has stalled in the campus LAN.

Building The Effortless Network As Brocade has considered today’s campus network and the impact of new applications and business demands, it has become clear that solving emerging problems using old assumptions is an inadequate approach. To achieve the required simplicity, scalability, availability, and dramatic reductions in cost of ownership requires a new vision. Brocade calls it The Effortless Network, and it is built from the innovations found in HyperEdge technology.

“There have been few substantial changes to the [enterprise] networking vendors’ approaches in the last 20 years.” —Gartner

“Don’t assume that current architectural approaches are the only way forward in designing campus LANs. Be prepared to evaluate different architectural solutions as they become available.” —Gartner


HyperEdge Technology Consolidated Management

Brocade HyperEdge Technology Brocade HyperEdge technology provides consolidated management and mix-and-match stacking on the campus LAN, so that you can operate at the speed of business, take risk and effort out of network administration, and have confidence in a network that “just works.” HyperEdge technology is designed to work with the Brocade ICX® Series of campus switches.

Consolidated Management Campus networks extend between buildings, across multiple floors, and—with wireless access points—span outdoor as well as indoor spaces. With traditional networks, adding a switch, changing a network policy, or adding another user device requires manual changes to multiple configuration settings in many switches, routers, access points, and controllers. The opportunity to make a mistake, not to mention the time and effort involved, is why operating costs and complexity in the campus network have gotten out of control.

With HyperEdge technology, multiple switches can be pooled together and managed as a single entity. Administrators can apply all configuration changes and policy settings to every switch assigned to the pool from a single point of management.

When a new switch is added to the pool, HyperEdge technology discovers the switch and its capabilities. Existing configuration and policy settings are automatically applied without operator intervention. The consolidated management of switch pools across the campus provided by HyperEdge technology makes switch configuration simple, automatic, and immediate. This provides assurance that security and access control policies are consistently applied as new switches are added.

In many campus networks, switch firmware upgrades create significant extra work, requiring time-consuming manual changes to each switch. Consolidated management includes the ability to apply a new firmware release automatically to every switch in a pool.

Finally, as traffic patterns become more complex and devices grow, tools that simplify traffic monitoring and management are critical for a high-quality user experience. An important capability built into the Brocade campus LAN products supported by HyperEdge technology is the open standard sFlow protocol. With sFlow, administrators have immediate access to traffic statistics. They can see an overview of the entire campus network and zoom into a single virtual machine hosting a VDI application or UC server. sFlow support across a set of switches pooled together with HyperEdge technology means administrators can continue to use their favorite sFlow monitoring applications with the Brocade family of campus switches.


HyperEdge Technology Mix-and-Match Stacking

Mix-and-Match Stacking Switch stacking is a common method of scaling connectivity and bandwidth at a lower cost than with a chassis switch. Stacking connects multiple switches together using dedicated stacking ports on each switch. However, current stacking methods also have restrictions. Flexibility is lost, as all switches in a stack must have the same hardware configuration and features enabled, including expensive Layer 3 protocols. Finally, investment protection is limited, because upgrading switch hardware requires all switches in the stack to be replaced, while adding premium features means all switches have to be upgraded.

HyperEdge mix-and-match switch stacking eliminates all these drawbacks and lowers first cost, while improving scalability and flexibility. HyperEdge switching stacks can include a mix of Layer 2 and premium Layer 3 switches in the same stack. All switches share the premium Layer 3 protocols without requiring every switch to be upgraded or replaced. A single advanced Layer 3 switch (or two switches, for high availability) can be added to a stack at any time. All switches can send traffic to the Layer 3 capable switches, dramatically reducing the cost of the stack.

HyperEdge mix-and-match stacking provides all the benefits of chassis switch architecture. For example, in a chassis, it is easy to combine a high-performance routing card with high-density Layer 2 Ethernet cards. For the first time, HyperEdge mix-and-match stacking offers the same benefits in a highly cost-effective switch stack. More important, as new campus products become available with advanced services and features, they can be added to existing stacks without replacing or upgrading the other switches in the stack. This unique innovation delivers long awaited investment protection, increased operational flexibility, and significant first-cost savings to the campus LAN.


HyperEdge Technology Delivers The Effortless Network Campus LAN architecture built with HyperEdge technology is ready to take on the challenges of streaming video, UC, and VDI applications with built-in scalability and ease of management that keeps up with the growth in mobile devices. With advances such as consolidated management and mix-and-match stacking, HyperEdge technology solves all of the operations management lifecycle problems in today’s campus network. From installation to upgrade, every step is simple. Also, first cost and OpEx are reduced, while configurations and policy settings are uniformly applied one time, every time.

Figure 2. HyperEdge Technology simplifies the operations lifecycle and reduces OpEx for the campus network.


The Effortless Network is here. As you look toward the next decade of business and technology changes and start to rethink your existing campus LAN strategy, challenge Brocade to deliver a personalized Brocade One architecture tailored to your unique campus environment. Figure 2 shows one way to apply the Brocade HyperEdge technology to the campus LAN, making it a cost-effective strategic asset for the next decade.

*Brocade HyperEdge technology is planned to be available for purchase in the first half of 2013.

Figure 3. Brocade campus network reference architecture.

To learn more about The Effortless Network, Brocade HyperEdge technology, and the Brocade ICX Campus Switch family, visit http://www.brocade.com/products/all/switches/index.page.


© 2012 Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 12/12 GA-PP-431-01

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