Ricoh embraces Brocade fabric technology to transform cloud data center

BENGALURU: NASDAQ-listed networking solutions provider Brocade has announced that the digital imaging giant Ricoh has migrated to an Ethernet fabric network within its Yokohama data center. The deployment of switches supporting Brocade VCS Fabric technology enables Ricoh to greatly reduce network operating costs and complexity within its data center while providing the company with a far more agile infrastructure upon which to respond to changing business needs.

Since the Yokohama data center was established in 2010, system expansion – driven by Ricoh’s increasing use of information technology to deliver business value as well as to ensure business continuity internally. – had been making the network infrastructure and operations more complex. In particular, the increased use of virtualization within the data center was putting pressure on both available network bandwidth and administration resources.

“Network complexity was becoming a significant constraint on our ability to respond quickly to new business requirements,” said Toshiyuki Miyakoshi, senior specialist, Information Infrastructure Control Department, Business Process Transformation, Corporate Division, Ricoh Company, Ltd. “Brocade’s Ethernet fabric solution enables us to manage the entire data center network, spanning multiple floors, as if it were a single core switch that is self-configuring. This greatly reduces our operational overhead and makes it very easy for us to scale network capacity to meet future demand.”

The Brocade VDX 6940 switches deployed by Ricoh provide a solid foundation for data center transformation, delivering the performance, flexibility, scale, and efficiency essential to operating a highly-virtualized data center. The scale-out architecture enables “pay-as-you grow” expansion aligned to business demand, with a highly resilient network fabric designed to eliminate downtime.

“Ricoh is already benefiting from the fundamental value of Brocade VCS fabrics, which is to deliver networking that simply works – not networking that needs frequent attention,” said Matt Kolon, chief technology officer for Asia Pacific and Japan, Brocade. “Over time, Ricoh’s return on investment in Brocade VDX switches will increase as its cloud data center journey starts to incorporate software-defined networking features.”

In parallel with the deployment of Brocade VDX switches, Ricoh has also upgraded the Yokohama data center’s wide-area connectivity – initially to 10 Gbps – to provide better end-user access to applications hosted in its private cloud. Committed to further automating the network equipment configuration setting, Ricoh has turned to Brocade’s technical expertise to address future system expansions as well as customer demands for faster services.