Brocade is using  its latest switch release to target what it believes will be a sweet spot in the market – companies looking to relieve costs by using technology that can reduce spending on the stack.

Yesterday it unveiled a new architectural framework and switch family designed to allow companies to scale out their network architecture as required, removing the need for spending on an entire stack by using intelligence to link network capabilities between old and new infrastructure.

Brocade UK and Ireland manager Marcus Jewell said Brocade is hoping to fill a gap he said is left by market leaders Cisco and HP, which he said cater largely to the high-end enterprise market.

“The market is dominated by Cisco for many reasons – they have a very strong organization and [their offering to clients is] based on lots of features and complicated software load,” Jewell said.

“And when the challenger HP came to market it had a really good price point – it was trying to commoditize the edge of the data network.

“We looked at how we could play in the market with those two extremes, and realized the big problem was the interoperability between product lines. Our [network] edge products can connect [switches] together in logical stacks at the edge of network.”

Jewell said the Brocade ICX switch family released this week has simplified and automated access to layer networks for reduced overhead, can scale and be upgraded for emerging applications over the next decade and offers enterprise-class functionality.

“We have started with our lowest functionality switch that will support 90% of what most enterprises need – good throughputs, uptime, it can deal with unified communications solutions and has Power over Ethernet.

“But if you decide you are running out a complicated VDI program from a client server environment you would require some other functionality.

“With this solution you would then only need to change one switch in the stack to bring that traditional VDI multiclass functionality to it.”

Jewell said such capability is especially attracting the attention of the service provider interested in the idea of scalability and simplicity.

“Many customers re getting bored of having to do continual facelifts and upgrades of their networks – if you change the network, the end user does not know of care,” Jewell said.

The Brocade ICX campus LAN switch was released as part of Brocade’s new Effortless Network vision based on Brocade’s HyperEdge technology.

The solution offers built in unified communications security to cater for the rise in mobile devices in the enterprise and virtual desktop infrastructure. It allows you to build a network of switches as required, from the ICX 6430 Switch and 6450 Switch with Layer 2 and Layer 3 functionality and support for Energy-efficient Ethernet (EE) and MACsec encryption.

Both come in 24 and 48-port models with the option of 1/10GbE uplink stacking ports and can be stacked up to 384 ports.

Brocade also released a new architectural framework which can serve as the foundation for Microsoft Lync unified communications deployments designed for hosted and non-hosted environments.

Brocade said the Microsoft Lync Server 2010 Multitenant Pack for Partner Hosting will help service providers differentiate services to customers.

Hear more on Marcus Jewell’s views on the data center network in 2012 in his January byline for FOCUS here.