Thomas Duryea client goes active-active using Brocade

Thomas Duryea has been revealed as supporting a major Brocade networking deployment by Australia’s largest workforce supplier Skilled Group.

The deployment connected Skilled Group’s primary data centre to a secondary site 30 kilometres away, with Brocade Ethernet and SAN fabrics linking both facilities so they would behave as a single entity.

Thomas Duryea sold the equipment, but was not involved in the implementation, said a Brocade spokesperson.

Brocade’s local senior director Gary Denman described it as a “textbook example” of the benefits of combining Brocade fabrics and EMC storage. 

The need for zero downtime was a key driving factor behind the move by Skilled, which has more than 80 branches around the world, and 50,000 full-time and part-time workers.

The virtualised infrastructure was built on Brocade VDX 6740 switches, with failover and IP replication services to Brocade Gen 5 Fibre Channel SANs, with active-active connections between the SANs. Brocade 6510 switches connected Oracle SPARC servers and a wide range of EMC storage.

Using Brocade VCS Fabric “stretched” across the two data centres, multiple devices spanning both sites could be managed as one logical switch through a single IP address.