Brocade unveiled its next data center network switch that does away with the legacy Spanning-Tree network architecture in favor of a flat “fabric” network, where a multitude of nodes on the network can talk to a multitude of other nodes instead of the single-point-to-single-point communication in traditional networks.

All major network vendors have been talking about network fabrics and all of them have products designed to enable such networks. The idea has picked up steam over the past couple of years as data center network traffic increasingly travels horizontally, as opposed to vertically, like it has travelled in traditional enterprise architectures.

According to the San Jose, California-based network vendor, fabrics are useful for both enterprise and service-provider data centers. Brocade CTO Dave Stevens said they were an “abstraction that is the key to building next-generation cloud data centers.”

Brocade’s new VDX 8770 modular Ethernet switch uses the company’s VCS fabric technology. “This product is purpose built for Ethernet fabrics,” Jason Nolet, VP of Brocade’s Data Center Networking group, said.

It can operate as a traditional network switch, but focus of the engineering team behind it was really on fabric.

There is a four- and an eight-slot versions of the VDX 8770 chassis. It allows customers to scale fabrics up to 8,000 switch ports and 384,000 virtual machines per chassis, Nolet said.

The product features 384 ports of 10GbE and 96 ports of 40GbE connectivity, but is also ready for dense 100GbE. Brocade claims the switch provides industry’s lowest port-to-port latency: 3.58 microseconds from any port to any port.

The company also boasts its multipathing capabilities, or multiple physical paths between devices.

Brocade plans to make the switch available on the market about three weeks from today.

The vendor claims it has more than 700 customers that are running network fabrics in production that are built on its solutions in their data centers.

Brocade’s first line of fabric products, the VDX 6720 family of 10GbE switches, came out in November 2010. Both Juniper and Cisco have launched their own versions of the flatter network since.

Brocade is going through changes at the top. The company has reportedly been shopping for a buyer, and its current CEO Michael Klayko announced in August he would resign as soon as the board finds a suitable replacement.