Brocade, long a player in the data center infrastructure space, is releasing its tether through a line of cloud-optimized networking solutions to advance public and private clouds.

The company is debuting the new technology at its annual Brocade Technology Day Summit May 2-4, 2011, where the cloud – and its opportunities for Brocade’s channel partners – takes center stage.

“We’re looking at what role the channel can play in the cloud,” said Barbara Spicek, vice president of worldwide channels at Brocade. “Forrester research said the channel is in ‘cloud identity disorder.’ From a technology perspective, we want to impart Brocade is the ideal vendor for the channel to take part in the cloud – we are in a leadership position because of our network fabric experience and we have the product line in place.”

At the same time, she added, Brocade is developing the tools and technologies to help its partners transform their position in the cloud. “Our entire focus is on cloud-enablement; we are actively driving extensive channel training activities such as free training and MDF utilization – we offer the biggest differentiation package training for the cloud at the lowest cost,” she said.

Indeed, earlier in 2011 Brocade introduced a Virtualized Fabric Partner specialization and the Brocade Certified Ethernet Fabric Engineer (BCEFE) certification, designed to support partners in the delivery of Ethernet fabric technologies. “We are once again increasing our focus on enablement and upgrading the skill set of channel partners, and getting them ready to embrace new technologies,” Spicek said of the new offerings. “These focus on virtual fabrics and our vision of the transformation of data center,” including a shift to the cloud.

At the Technology Day event, Brocade is introducing technologies to advance both use of the public cloud and development of private clouds, as well as its new CloudPlex architecture, an open, extensible framework intended to enable customers to build distributed and virtualized data centers in such a way that enables them to effectively manage all aspects of the migration. Brocade CloudPlex acts as the foundation for integrated compute blocks and works with existing multivendor infrastructure to create one unified compute and storage domain, according to Brocade.

Brocade’s fabric switching technology places the company in a leader position as more companies look to move more of their assets to the cloud. It’s up the Brocade to ensure its partners are ready, Spicek said.

“I see partners are excited and nervous – those in the box-moving business have to make a change and there is big pressure also on the distribution model. The VARs we deal with aren’t in the volume business, and we see them as having a big advantage, as well as those smarter resellers who have spent the last few years becoming solution providers and building out their services business. They are the most prepared,” Spicek said. “These days it’s now about ‘How fast can I drive this transformation?’”

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