Brocade has launched a subscription-based service allowing organisations to align network capacity with fluctuating business demands on a 'pay-as-you-grow' basis.
The new service will pitch the company against more established cloud network providers like Cisco and HP.
Brocade Network Subscription addresses "the unique requirements of cloud-based IT environments", the company said. Customers pay for their network infrastructure on a monthly basis, allowing them to scale up and down according to actual network usage.
"The challenge facing IT organisations today is that new technologies, such as cloud computing, are coming to the fore and are making it much more difficult to project and predict workloads," said Joe Pucciarelli, programme director of technology for financial and executive strategies at analyst company IDC.
"As a result, IDC believes that offerings like Brocade Network Subscription will rapidly become an integral method for acquiring IT resources as organisations seek to introduce heightened levels of flexibility and variability into their network infrastructure and related capacity management strategies."
The pay-as-you-grow aspect particularly targets companies migrating to cloud architectures from improving business processes and application availability to introducing new, value-added services.
Demand for these services as they appear and establish themselves online may cause traffic fluctuations. The subscription service allows expansion or contraction to handle the ebb and flow of network traffic as services mature.
"Brocade Network Subscription is the 'virtualisation' model for infrastructure procurement," said John McHugh, Brocade's chief marketing officer.
"Just like application virtualisation, this innovative approach allows organisations to acquire network capacity with little risk, while helping them scale up and scale down in line with their month-to-month needs."
Rackspace Hosting has become an early adopter of the new offering.
"Brocade Network Subscription perfectly aligns to our business model as it provides networking capabilities on a metered basis, as we need them, very much in the same way our customers utilise our own services," said Paul Rad, vice president of technology and private cloud at Rackspace. "The pay-as-you go model reduces our capital outlay so we can invest in other growth areas of our business."
