Chinese discount specialist travel agency has successfully virtualized its data center operations following the deployment of a VDX Ethernet fabric from Brocade. Ctrip.com International has about 500 virtual machines (VMs) on 200 host servers at its Shanghai data center along with additional VMs running at its testing and development center in Nantong, China.

Ctrip’s virtualization journey began in August 2012 when the company deployed its first Brocade VDX 6720 switch enabling the company to build a small Ethernet fabric within its data center and start migrating the first of its servers to its virtual platform.

Ctrip runs a multiple-hypervisor environment using VMware’s vSphere and Citrix’s XenServer.

The Brocade VDX switches are powered with Brocade VCS Fabric technology which supports multiple types of hypervisors. The use of VCS Fabric technology means expansion is a plug-and-play process with each new Brocade VDX switch instantly aware of the network topology and the location of the VMs. VCS Fabric technology delivers low-latency performance between ports, which is critical because much of the traffic flow in a cloud data center is between servers.

Brocade VCS fabrics are self-forming and self-healing, providing a highly resilient, scalable foundation for very large or dynamic cloud deployments. Multinode fabrics can be managed as a single logical element, and fabrics can be deployed and easily redeployed in a variety of configurations optimized to the needs of particular workloads.

With 10 GbE connectivity to the Ethernet fabric, the hypervisor host systems have ample bandwidth to service multiple VMs that would otherwise saturate a 1 GbE connection. Port-to-port latency of 600 nanoseconds and efficient load-balanced multipathing across the fabric help deliver the performance Ctrip.com needs to provide an excellent online experience for its customers.

“The plan from the outset was to make our data center virtualized in order to increase agility while managing cost, and that meant taking no half measures,” said Jason Shi, General Manager of Site Operations Center at Ctrip.com. “Our existing data center switching infrastructure was based on a conventional three-layer architecture that was simply not designed to support line-speed 10 Gigabit Ethernet and ultra-low latency virtualization,” he adds.