the leading technology partners and enterprise business applications and significantly
extending the range of solutions this powerful platform can provide.
Q What is Application Resource Broker?
A Working in tandem with ServerIron ADX, Brocade Application Resource Broker (ARB), is
an infrastructure software component used by IT operations staff who seek simplified,
on-demand application resource provisioning and de-provisioning within their data
centers. ARB assures adherence to application Service Level Agreements by dynamically
adding and removing application resources (VM’s) based on real-time monitoring of
infrastructure capacity and responsiveness.
Q What is the business case for this product?
A In tandem with ServerIron ADX, ARB delivers the key enabling technology to provide on-
demand services within a shared-infrastructure data center—commonly referred to as an
enterprise cloud. Brocade is enabling business-oriented and SLA-assured application
delivery with dynamically provisioned application infrastructure resources to
accommodate variable traffic loading for current and high-growth services. This
technology can reduce or eliminate the inefficiencies and high cost of provisioning for
peak load across thousands of applications, while ensuring resiliency in the delivery of
those services, and avoiding missed SLAs due to under-provisioning. Typical savings
include reduced intervention costs when remediating estimation errors and application
SLA issues, reduced power, cooling, space to service existing traffic demands and more
efficient infrastructure that can absorb the delivery of new business processes or
increased traffic without incurring additional capital expense.
Q What is the key or distinguishing feature of Application Resource Broker?
A As an extension to Brocade ServerIron ADX application delivery controllers, Application
Resource Broker can dynamically add and remove application resources when needed,
based on application traffic demands. This is achieved through real-time correlation of
application performance from the network and infrastructure capacity information from
server infrastructures like VMware. The Resource Broker leverages ADX’ unique position
in the network to provide real-time monitoring of application loading that drives
immediate, intelligent, and impactful response to changing application traffic demands.
This ultimately assures highly reliable service levels between end users and application
infrastructure without incurring the high cost of over-provisioning. The unique
combination of ServerIron ADX with Application Resource Broker associates the various
application components to their respective virtualized resources, enabling true
application-level visibility for IT operations. It is this pairing of application-centric visibility
with automated, on-demand provisioning that enables an on-demand virtualized IT
infrastructure.
Q Does Application Resource Broker support VMware vSphere 4.0
A Yes, Application Resource Broker supports vSphere/ESX 4.0
Q Will Application Resource Broker support other virtualization and orchestration
environments?
A Yes. As a proponent of standards-based compatibility and interoperability with the
widest range of virtualization and orchestration vendors, and to ensure customer choice
and flexibility, it is our intention to support other orchestration tools in the future
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