Tony Underwood - Brocade Tech Day - theCUBE
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 13/09/2012

Brocade, the multinational corporation that specializes in data and storage networking, is conquering the world of big data by combining their 15 years of fiber channel heritage with the best-of-breed ethernet fabric solutions.  They help companies worldwide to simplify their architecture, increase network availability and dramatically reduce the total cost of ownership.

At TheCube, SiliconANGLE’s premier video production, SiliconANGLE CEO and Founder John Furrier and Wikibon Senior Analyst Stuart Miniman had the pleasure of interviewing PayPerCloud EVP and CMO Tony Underwood at Brocade Tech Day.

PayPerCloud is a customer of Brocade that provides infrastructure-as-a-service and software-as-a-service, and then manage services to help SMBs go from an on-premise solution to a cloud solution.  This helps businesses take advantage of individual SaaS offerings, or a fully dedicated private cloud environment.

According to Underwood, Brocade helps PayPErCloud bring customers to the cloud by lowering the cost of operations by reducing the need to buy more servers that hold important data.  He states that the great thing about Brocade is that it helped them maintain the cost of keeping servers while being able to broaden their offerings.

“We had an environment that had the ability to have eight servers in a rack.  After we deployed our new infrastructure, we had the capacity of 12 servers in a rack,” Underwood stated when asked if virtualization was part of their future.  “I have a cost structure that can support now, in the same footprint, 12 servers.  The real magic, though, wasn’t the number of servers, it was the number of VMs I can support inside that.  It grew from around a hundred to 500.

“It was a significant improvement in the ability for me to sell virtual machines or resource out to my customer with a cost structure that stayed in the same footprint.  The economics for us, as we look at our growth prospects, if we can continue to grow the business without the cost growing in direct proportion that – we have a business model.  It becomes very interesting.”

As for ending up with Brocade, Underwood stated that there were a lot of options were presented to them but Brocade stood out because they not only presented a technical solution, they had a technical solution that made sense from a cost perspective, as well as service and support capabilities that work well with PayPerCloud.

Underwood also explained that, from his point of view, what the much talked about ethernet fabric is all about.  According to him, ethernet fabric is the ability to have a layer across your networking infrastructure where it appears as one solution.