New OpenPOWER Member Brocade Showcases Work at Mobile World Congress

By Brian Larsen, Director, Partner Business Development, Brocade

In my 32 year career in the IT industry there has never been a better time to embrace the partnership needed to meet client requirements, needs and expectations.  Brocade has built its business on partnering with suppliers who deliver enterprise class infrastructure in all the major markets. This collaborative mindset is what led us to the OpenPOWER Foundation, where an eco-system of over 180 vendors, suppliers, and researchers can build new options for client solutions.

Brocade recognizes that OpenPOWER platforms are providing choice and with that choice comes the need to enable those platforms with the same networking capabilities that users are familiar with.  If you have been in a cave for the last eight years, you may not know that Brocade has broken out of its mold of being a fibre channel switch vendor and now supports a portfolio of IP networking platforms along with innovative solutions in Software Defined Networking (SDN) and Network Function Virtualization (NFV). Our work will allow our OpenPOWER partners to design end to end solutions that include both storage and IP networked solutions.  Use cases for specific industries can be developed for high-speed network infrastructure for M2M communication or compute to storage requirements.  As target use cases evolve, networking functionality could transform from a physical infrastructure to a virtual architecture where the compute platform is a critical & necessary component.

The OpenPOWER Foundation’s membership has exploded since its inception and is clearly making a mark on new data center options for users who expect peak performance to meet today’s demanding IT needs.  As Brocade’s SVP and GM of Software Networking, Kelly Herrell says, “OpenPOWER processors provide innovation that powers datacenter and cloud workloads”.  Enterprise Datacenters and Service Providers (SP) markets are key areas of focus for Brocade and by delivering on its promise of the “New IP” businesses will be able to transition to more automation, accelerated service delivery and new revenue opportunities.

Brocade will be at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and IBM’s InterConnect Conference in Las Vegas from February 22-25th, come see us and let us show you the advantages of being an eco-system partner with us.

Brian Larsen joined Brocade in July 1991 and has more than 29 years of professional experience in high-end processing, storage, disaster recovery, Cloud, virtualization and networking environments. Larsen is the Director of Partner Business Development Executive responsible for solution and business development within all IBM divisions. For the last 5 years, he has focused on both service provider and enterprise markets with specific focus areas in: Cloud, Virtualization, Software Defined Networking (SDN), Network Function Virtualization (NFV), Software Defined Storage (SDS) and Analytics solutions.