Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) recently announced that CHINA PHARMACEUTICAL UNIVERSITY(CPU) has successfully consolidated multiple server farms into a single cloud data center supported by a comprehensive New IP networking solution from Brocade. The new data center will enable the university -- which is among China's elite "211 Project" educational institutions -- to strengthen its pharmacological research and accelerate application delivery while reducing operating costs.

Like many universities and colleges in China, much of CPU's server infrastructure has been autonomously deployed by individual academic departments to meet their particular requirements, leaving the university's relatively under-developed central IT facilities to support administrative functions. Going forward, however, CPU is using data center virtualization to provide a far more efficient, flexible, and powerful infrastructure that supports all academic and administrative requirements from a unified data center that includes a high-performance computing platform.

"It no longer makes sense to have decentralized server and data storage facilities -- with all the duplication and limitations -- especially as computer modelling has become such an important technique in pharmacological research," said Yuan Quan, deputy director of information technology center of China Pharmaceutical University. "The New IP networking solution from Brocade provides the virtual network foundation for our new cloud data center operations, enabling us to efficiently manage our resources as a single pool and easily scale without increasing operating costs. When it came to making the network choice, Brocade's proposal was clearly superior in terms of value, performance, and capabilities -- with a strong SDN roadmap."

CPU is leveraging BROCADE® VCS® FABRIC TECHNOLOGY within the data center to establish a seamless and highly automated Ethernet fabric, fully integrated with its virtualized server and storage infrastructure, while using Network Functions Virtualization (NFV) to support Virtual Machine (VM) security and load balancing. As a result -- and compared to operating its previous, decentralized server farms -- the university has been able to slash operating costs while providing a far more capable platform to power its academic and administrative applications.

"Deployment of a New IP network infrastructure has been a critical element in China Pharmaceutical University rapidly achieving its vision of a cloud data center," said Eric Yu, Vice President of Greater China, Brocade. "In doing so, it has taken a massive stride to the forefront of universities in China that are leveraging cloud technologies to improve learning systems, accelerate research, and enhance institutional development. CPU is already enjoying a strong return on investment, and this will increase with the level of data center automation as it leverages software-defined networking."

Brocade VDX® 8770 and VDX 6740 switches deployed by CPU form the nodes of the "spine and leaf" Ethernet fabric that efficiently delivers wire-speed 10 Gigabit ports with low-latency port-to-port performance that is ideal for cloud computing operations. The self-forming, self-healing fabric is VM-aware and supports automated VM mobility between hypervisor hosts. The Brocade VDX switches also provide a Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE) gateway, enabling VM hosts to access the university's EMC VPLEX virtual storage cluster without the need for SAN interfaces.

The BROCADE VROUTER has been deployed within the data center to provide VM security while the BROCADE VIRTUAL ADX® application delivery controller handles server load balancing and security at the application level. Both these Brocade NFV software offerings run on the same standardized virtual server infrastructure as CPU's applications, enabling the university to scale capacity quickly and easily, as required.