South Korea's Dong-Eui University is virtualising its data center with Brocade switches as the university begins its transition to cloud computing.

The private University is using Brocade's VCS Fabric technology as part of a phased plan to deploy cloud computing infrastructure to support the university's administration, teaching and research.

Jong-Yoo Kim, Dong-Eui University head of IT, says Brocade has enabled the university to start with a small deployment, secure in the knowledge that it can easily scale in an incremental but linear manner.

“Compared to what our established network vendor was able to offer, Brocade VDX switches running VCS Fabric technology provide remarkable value without compromising capacity, performance or stability,” Kim says.

The university is using Brocade VDX 6740 switches as the foundation of its new data center network. The switches support up to 64 wire-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) ports, with the units being deployed with an initial 24 active ports and the option to activate more in eight-port increments using Brocade's pay as you grow Ports on Demand licensing model.

Embedded VCS Fabric technology mans any additional switches connected to the network are auto-configured to become part of the Ethernet fabric, which acts as a single intelligent switch.

The University also required strong integration with VMware solutions, with scalable network infrastructure capable of supporting the high-bandwidth requirements of multiple virtual machines running on VMware ESXi hosts.

Brocade's VCS Fabric technology is VM-aware, enabling it to look into the hypervisor, detect new VMs, extract network profile information and automatically apply it to every switch in the fabric. VM profile information is automatically migrated as VMs are moved between servers.

The switches also support VMware's network virtualisation platform for the software-defined data center, NSX.

Mike Lee, Brocade Korea country manager, says Dong-Eui University clearly understands that data center virtualisation is a long-term undertaking and that deploying an intelligent network infrastructure which can easily be grown in line with demand is a smart way to start.

“With South Korean university budgets under continual pressure, this is a great example of how to manage the transition to cloud computing.