Network vendor Brocade on Monday launched a new line of data center network switches designed to enable flat network fabrics that rid the network of the Spanning Tree Protocol, enhance Virtual-Machine mobility and simplify network management in highly virtualized environments.

The two new VDX 6720 data center switches are a new family of 10GbE switches for Layer 2 Ethernet networking. They allow for collapsing the Access and Aggregation layers into a flat network. The switches come in 1U or 2U form factors, scalable from 16 to 60 ports. The new switches are available now, starting at $10,700;and Brocade offers pay-as-you-go licensing in a pricing scheme it calls "Ports on Demand."

A Brocade news release quoted IDC analyst Cindy Borovick, who forecasted that VM’s will run more than half of all IT loads by the end of this year. Borovick expected the number to reach 70 percent by the end of 2013. "The new Brocade VDX 6720 switches, powered by VCS technology, are a natural evolution of Brocade’s trusted status in the data center – taking the best attributes from Fibre Channel and applying that knowledge to form a comprehensive Ethernet fabric."

The switches provide full 10Gbps wire-speed performance from any port to any port, with latency of 600 nanoseconds. Based on the 10Gbps Data Center Bridging technology, they support a variety of protocols, including IP, iSCSI, CIFS, NFS and Fibre Channel over Ethernet.

Brocade said the solution supports whatever current servers, hypervisors or storage devices customers may have in their data centers and interface "seamlessly" with existing network infrastructures.

This is the first line of products that feature Brocade’s new VCS technology – initially unveiled in June – which enables virtual cluster switching in data center networks. The network fabrics built on VCS support the Transparent Interconnection of Lots of Links (TRILL) network protocol, which replaces SPT.

VCS enables every switch in the fabric to be aware of the entire network topology. VM mobility is enhanced by the Automatic Migration of Port Profiles (AMPP) technology, which enables VM network characteristics and configuration to migrate along with the VM automatically. A VDX 6720 switching cluster supports a mobility sphere of 600 10GbE ports and 8,000 VM’s.

Network management is simplified by treating an entire switching cluster as a single switch.