Videocon D2H selects Brocade ethernet fabrics

BANGALORE, INDIA: India's fastest-growing Direct-To-Home (DTH) satellite broadcaster has selected Brocade Ethernet fabric solutions to revamp its data center networks. Videocon d2h, a unit of Videocon Industries (BSE: 511389, NSE: VIDEOIND), deployed innovative Brocade VCS Fabric Technology running on Brocade VDX switches within its new and existing data centers in order to support continued rapid business growth.

India is the world's most competitive DTH satellite market with the participation of six private service providers and India's state-owned TV broadcaster. When Videocon d2h launched its services in 2009, it was last to enter the field, yet it managed to attract more than 10 million subscribers in just over four years, putting it within 30 percent of the much longer-established market leader.

"Thanks to pioneering high-end services-such as full 1080i high-definition channels ,3D programming, PVR, USB PVR, and so on-we've been adding around a million new customers a quarter in the recent past ," said Samir Dhaga, Vice President, IT at Videocon d2h. "With such rapid business growth, there has been an exponential increase in the internal data center traffic. With the 1 Gbps network quickly running out of steam, we had to rapidly embrace newer technologies. We therefore embarked on a program to expand capacity by building a third data center and upgrading our existing infrastructure with an emphasis on high-speed internal networks that would support virtualization, availability, and manageability."

Brocade VDX 6720 switches were initially deployed at Videocon D2h's new data center, which was specifically designed to support virtualization, with the deployment at the company's two other facilities following in a second phase. Along with other members of Brocade VDX family, the Brocade VDX 6720 switches feature Brocade VCS Fabric technology, which enables Videocon to "flatten" its data center networks, provide Virtual Machine (VM) mobility without network reconfiguration, and manage the entire fabric more efficiently.

Each fabric operates as a single virtual Ethernet device, which greatly simplifies management. Moreover, the approach eliminates the use of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), which would otherwise be a serious impediment to virtualized data center performance. The single-layer Ethernet fabric is also highly efficient and resilient, with load-balanced multipathing at Layers 1, 2, and 3 and support for multiple Layer 3 gateways.

"Clearly, a smart networking decision was required in order to address existing and potential bottlenecks arising from the adoption of data center virtualization. We conducted a thorough study of the available options-including six months of testing-before deciding on Brocade VDX switches as our data center networking platform going forward," added Samir Dhaga.