Institute of Directors (IoD) Accelerates Virtualization Strategy and Meets Member Demand With Brocade 10 GbE Routing

LONDON, Jan 18 (MARKET WIRE) --
The Institute of Directors (IoD), the longest standing membership
organization for business leaders, has turned to Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD)
to increase its network performance and reliability, and lay the
foundation for an enterprise-wide virtualization strategy. With data
volumes having doubled three times in the last five years and with plans
to roll out bandwidth-hungry services, such as online training and video
streaming, the IoD needed to upgrade its legacy network to deliver 10
Gigabit Ethernet (GbE) performance and a blueprint for future growth.

The IoD provides support and services to over 40,000 business leaders,
who are some of the most skilled and experienced leaders in the country,
representing the full business spectrum -- from start-up entrepreneurs to
directors in the public sector and CEOs of multinational organisations.
Members of the IoD have access to a variety of services including
director level training, networking events across the UK, and free legal
and tax advice.

Doug Radford, IT Infrastructure Manager at the IoD, said, "Over the past
couple of years we have seen data traffic volumes increase dramatically,
which has placed a huge strain on the network and meant that we were
challenged in maintaining service quality. Our legacy architecture [based
on older Brocade switches] had been enhanced, but we knew a more
fundamental change was required to ensure we could keep pace with member
demand. Finding a network solution that provided the bandwidth,
resilience and scalability, plus long-term total cost of ownership
savings, was absolutely key. Migrating to the Brocade(R) FastIron(R) SX
Series switches has ensured we can continue to deliver high-quality
services and support, while maintaining our mandate on delivering ROI
through cost-efficiency."

The IoD selected Brocade FastIron SX Series Switches as the foundation of
its resilient 10 GbE solution, which was delivered through local partner,
Tatra Systems Ltd. The switches provide industry-leading
price/performance value in a campus aggregation and core solution that
offers a scalable, secure, low-latency and fault-tolerant IP service
infrastructure for 10 GbE enterprise deployments. As a result, the
switches provide a more scalable foundation that enables increased
operational efficiency and is more capable of adapting to changing
business opportunities today and into the future.

Radford continued, "Brocade's heritage in networking and its reputation
for quality and reliability made our selection process considerably
easier. Over a three-weekend period, we successfully migrated to
Brocade's latest 10 GbE technology to give the IoD a platform to build on
for the next decade. We were able to leverage existing switch
configurations, which made the migration seamless, and the greater
bandwidth and resilience delivered by the Brocade FastIron SX switches
supports our vision for the future, delivering dynamic services such as
increased video streaming for online training and seminars and the
ability to greatly improve our online presence."

The new Brocade network means the IoD can proceed with its virtualization
plans, as part of its efforts to reduce its server estate, which requires
a low-latency network. The IoD currently has 50 servers and the resizing
exercise is now underway. As part of this program, legacy applications
will be moved onto a more flexible platform to support increases in
demand, and its membership management system will also be moved onto a
virtualized platform to provide better resilience and failover
capabilities. Desktop virtualization is also being investigated as a way
to offer IT staff greater flexibility and a more available IT environment.

"The enhanced infrastructure has removed performance bottlenecks between
servers, and has improved backup times; it now takes seven to eight hours
to fully back up versus 12 hours on the old system; whilst also providing
a platform for virtualization. I have been delighted by the rollout and
the excellent support provided by local partner, Tatra Systems. Brocade
has once again provided a platform that the IoD can build upon over the
coming years," said Radford.

Marcus Jewell, country manager UK/Ireland at Brocade, stated, "What we
have seen at the IoD is a company that has always looked to the future.
It proactively made the decision to migrate to Brocade's next generation
of switches to ensure that it could scale with demand, and the Brocade
FastIron SX Series switches have enabled the firm to confidently build a
business plan around dynamic service delivery and virtualization, knowing
that the network needed to support this is in now place."

About Brocade 10 and 100 GbE Routing Solutions
Leading-edge services
such as HD video streaming, cloud services and mobile broadband have
significantly altered network traffic behavior. Instead of localized
flows with occasional bursts, traffic flows are more collaborative over
geographical distances and they last longer. These new traffic patterns
consume enormous amounts of network capacity and add a greater degree of
complexity to network operations. Brocade 10 and 100 GbE routing
solutions deliver scalability, performance, operational simplicity and
cost-effectiveness to not only solve these challenges, but also help
customers seize this opportunity and generate more business.

For more information, please visit www.brocade.com.

About Brocade
Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) networking solutions help the
world's leading organizations transition smoothly to a world where
applications and information reside anywhere. (www.brocade.com)

Copyright 2012 Brocade Communications Systems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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