PQ – Show 11 – Brocade VDX 8770 – Technical Deep Dive

While I was at the Brocade analyst day, I got two of product leads for the VDX8770 chassis into a room to talk about the recent product announcements and go over some of the details of the new “big switch”. Lets face it, big chassis switches don’t come around very often and sometimes you don’t get a chance to find out what’s happening under the hood. This discussion is focussed on the technical capabilities/features on the chassis and line cards.

I wasn’t too happy that they didn’t want to talk about some areas of the technology claiming that is “NDA”. For example, using a distributed forwarding architecture isn’t a secret when other vendors have published detailed technical documents on that same feature. If you have something amazing, then tell my why your capability is better than the alternatives.

Topics

• Describing the Line Card Architecture
• Brocade L1 Trunking.
• Brocade VCS / LACP L2 Trunking
• Brocade L3 Multi-Gateway feature
• How the scale out process starts small and grows large. The VDX is a modular systems that can start with just a couple of switches.
• Physical details on power supplies, line cards and leaf spine details.

Links

Link to Brocade VCS Whitepaper  is here

Ivan Peplnjak blog post on VDX launch

Guests

• Premal Savla, Brocade
• Sanjib HomChaudhuri, Director of Product Management, Brocade

Disclosure

Brocade paid for Greg’s travel and accommodation to attend this event. Greg didn’t receive any other consideration or control over my content. Brocade neither asked or expected me to support this event.

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