AGRF chooses Brocade to manage data growth
2014-07-24Driven by the unrelenting growth of genomic data sets, the Australian Genome Research Facility (AGRF) is deploying a high-performance 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) core network across its entire estate, with its Melbourne node the first to go live with new switching infrastructure from Brocade.
One of the issues faced by AGRF and the genomic research community at large is coping with Big Data, with the latest generation of gene sequencing technology generating data files of over a terabyte every week off each of its five systems in operation. At the AGRF's Melbourne node, the IT infrastructure has been upgraded to deliver the compute power, storage capacity and network performance to handle the growing data challenge.
To replace its legacy network switches, Gismon said AGRF went to market for a solution that could deliver low-latency 10 GbE performance at wire-speed, with a simplified network architecture and streamlined network management. He said the focus was on a cost-effective single-vendor solution that could handle three years of projected network traffic growth, to be rolled out across all AGRF sites.
In response to AGRF's requirements, Brocade partner MYCOM, proposed a solution based around the Brocade ICX 6610 Switch, which is designed to deliver chassis-like switch capabilities in a stackable form factor. MYCOM was able to demonstrate its solution onsite and run a proof-of-concept project to show that a Brocade ICX 6610 switch stack could meet all of AGRF's performance and latency requirements while being extremely simple to operate.
"As the Australian Genome Research Facility has discovered, the Brocade ICX 6610 switches offer fairly unprecedented levels of performance, availability and flexibility in a stackable form- factor. They are easy to deploy, easy to manage and easy to integrate into both new and existing networks. With capacity upgrades though software licences and the ability to scale by adding to a stack, this is very much a 'pay-as-you-grow' solution that enables the AGRF to easily cope with its Big Data growth," said Adam Judd, Brocade Vice-President for Asia-Pacific.
Each Brocade ICX 6610 has four dedicated 40 GbE stacking ports that enable up to eight switches to be linked into a single logical device, managed through a single IP address, with 320 Gbps of total backplane stacking bandwidth. Each switch has up to eight 10 GbE fiber ports and 48 1 GbE ports. In a stacked configuration, traffic forwarding is transparent across the pool of ports, all of which deliver wire-speed, non-blocking performance.
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