Japanese telco Softbank has deployed Brocade VDX switches to provide Ethernet fabrics, streamlining its data center operations and increasing business agility.

The new infrastructure is designed to reduce complexity and the cost of network operations within SoftBank's data centers, providing the company with more agility to pursue new growth opportunities with over-the-top services.

Takenobu Yamane, Softbank manager of system infrastructure and service platform, says increased data center agility is critical to help the telco realise its strategy of delivering new OTT services to drive growth.

More than 70 Brocade VDX 6740 and 6740-T switches have been deployed in three key Softbank centers.

Yamane says the deployment of the switches as part of the new common service infrastructure network gives the data centers a more flexible and automated foundation, supporting a much more streamlined and cost effective operational model that is capable of responding rapidly to new demands.

The company has a strong track record of using data center virtualisation to support the systems supporting internal applications and external services, however, increasing numbers and scale of applications and services saw Softbank beginning to experience significant network operational issues stemming from the complexity of the existing infrastructure.

The Brocade switches create an elastic, self-forming and self-healing Ethernet fabric with Brocade VCS Logical Chassis functionality enabling the entire fabric to be managed as a single switch.

The fabric-based architecture simplifies and automates virtual machine mobility and management within the data centers, helping support cloud data center operations and enabling Softbank to increase the flexibility and responsiveness of the data centers and scale the infrastructure to meet current and future demands.

Brocade sasy Softbank is considering adding more Ethernet fabric devices to expand its common service infrastructure network and exploring further ways to automate its data center operations leveraging SDN and other tools.