Brocade tries port leasing for switches

Brocade has brought a network infrastructure leasing model to Australia that will enable larger enterprise players to pay for switch ports on a monthly subscription basis.

Under the Brocade Network Subscription (BNS) model, customers would receive a bundle of hardware and management software.

The software took note of the number of ports used on the switch and reported that data to Brocade, which then billed the customer based on their use patterns.

Regional director Graham Schultz said the model had been in selective use in North America for some time with customers such as Rackspace.

Schultz said customers were able to turn ports on and off as they required them. Customers would be billed monthly.

It was unclear whether customers would be billed only for the days or hours they used a particular port or whether they would pay a pro-rated monthly fee for switching a port off in the middle of a month.

“I can’t comment on if you’ve only used it X number of days a month how that’s going to be worked out,” he said.

“We don’t have that information at hand yet.”

Schultz also flagged the potential to treat core and edge routing ports differently.

“As this rolls out we’ll get further details on different tiering on pricing and what I would imagine, but can’t commit to, is that it may be dependent as well not only on capacity and ports but on what types of ports,” he said.

“So if you’re doing core routing, ports may have a different weighting and cost to edge ports.

“There will be a formula and a model that we will work with to calculate that but it will be on a case-by-case basis depending on the customer’s requirements.”

The subscription model targeted cloud and managed service providers who would otherwise be required to “overcapitalise” on switch infrastructure ahead of knowing exactly what their customer workloads would be.

Brocade also made several product announcements to coincide with the VMworld conference in the United States.

It launched reference architectures for its CloudPlex architecture with Dell, EMC, Fujitsu, Hitachi and VMware.

CloudPlex is a framework that allowed customers to mix-and-match server, virtualisation, networking and storage products when building a data centre or cloud compute.

The company also beefed up its VDX switch line with two new products and more advanced network management software.