As organizations look for ways to modernize their data centers to meet both current and future business requirements, they are increasingly turning to virtualization and cloud computing. To gain the full benefits of these technologies, organizations need a reliable, high-performance data center networking infrastructure with built-in investment protection.

Based on over 15 years of proven data center expertise, Brocade is leading the way to the virtualized data center and the cloud with the unique Brocade One strategy. The comprehensive family of Brocade networking solutions provides a robust foundation for these data center environments, enabling organizations to achieve their most critical business objectives.

The data center is arguably the most active and critical segment of today's IT environment in terms of innovation, strategy, and investment. In particular, it is integral to key initiatives such as the migration of legacy IT infrastructures and architectures to a more flexible, agile cloud model in its various forms—including public, private, and hybrid clouds. One of the key factors driving organizations to migrate to these new, more agile IT architectures is the need to better address the complexities associated with the widespread and accelerating adoption of server virtualization.

More than ever, IT organizations face the reality that they will need to upgrade and modernize their legacy infrastructures to be more dynamic, reliable, and scalable in order to meet the needs of a virtualized data center. Brocade believes that an intelligent, ultra-reliable, and high-performance network infrastructure is fundamental because networks are the touch points for all resources available in the data center.

This vision is the driving force behind the Brocade One strategy and its four core value propositions:

• Unmatched simplicity: Reducing complexity and costs is a key IT initiative and one of the motivations for moving to cloud architectures.
• Non-stop networking: The networks that support cloud architectures must provide high performance and reliability in order to meet today's stringent service level agreements.
• Investment protection: The ROI for moving to cloud architectures will take too long to achieve if the only option is to rip and replace existing infrastructure.
• Application optimization: Cloud architectures need to support current and emerging applications to be most effective. A high-performance, intelligent network infrastructure is a critical requirement.

Today, Brocade offers a comprehensive data center networking portfolio that includes solutions for storage networking, IP networking, converged networking, and an emerging category called Ethernet fabrics.