Case Study: Vale of Glamorgan Council achieves high-performance, resilient, energy-efficient data center with Brocade

Vale of Glamorgan Council - Customer Case Study

Vale of Glamorgan Council, which provides transportation, housing, social and other public services to residents in south Wales, relied on aging data-center switches to run its core network, VMware environment, contact center, telephony and an Oracle SAN. Growing traffic, 1 GbE trunk limits, proprietary protocols and spanning-tree failures were causing congestion and degrading application performance, so the Council set out to consolidate three data centers into a new, energy-efficient site and upgrade to at least 10 GbE for greater resiliency and scalability.

The Council deployed Brocade VDX switches as redundant top-of-rack units (10 GbE ports, 40 GbE uplinks) and Brocade ICX 6610 switches at the disaster-recovery and development sites, using Brocade VCS fabric and VRRP for multipathing. The new design eliminated trunk congestion, improved application performance and availability, sped up backups and replication, simplified integration with legacy gear and is expected to significantly reduce energy and cooling needs while providing an easily scalable, high‑resiliency foundation.

Vale of Glamorgan Council

Edward Jones

Principal ICT Officer of ICT Services