SAN JOSE, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 19, 2015) - Brocade (NASDAQ: BRCD) today announced the IT department at the California Department of Water Resources (DWR) has modified and activated its multi-tenant Tier III data center based on New IP technologies from Brocade and VMware that are enabling the agency's employees to help California residents and businesses manage one of the longest droughts in the state's history through faster deployment of applications that are driving more effective management and conservation programs.

Headquartered in Sacramento, Calif., DWR was established in 1956. Now that California is experiencing one of the most severe droughts in its history, water conservation is among the state's highest priorities.

DWR is now using New IP technologies that include Ethernet fabrics and virtualized compute and networking to deploy and manage cloud-based applications to mitigate the impact of the four-year drought.

Brocade and VMware are enabling DWR IT staff to improve its ability to deliver and maintain critical applications deployed across all of the agency's departments that are used to support the numerous activities that have been created for conserving and managing water use, including incentive programs, data collection, reporting and analysis.

Specifically, Brocade and VMware have enabled DWR to create a self-service, private-cloud portal that automatically establishes network connectivity, security and other essential policies that are used by applications to access virtual machines running on servers, as well as to access data residing on storage arrays. The new portal has reduced the time to deploy applications to as little as 15 minutes, compared to days and weeks that were required using prior infrastructure service provisioning methods.

"Information technology has played a critical role in enabling California to develop and deliver solutions to help mitigate the impacts of the drought and to help residents and businesses meet the State's goals for water use reduction," said Tim Garza, chief information officer at DWR. "In addition to speeding up the deployment of applications and improving the effective use of compute resources used by DWR's program areas, our new self-service portal will soon be expanded to automate infrastructure provisioning for more than 30 other organizations within the California Natural Resources Agency."

Brocade VDX Ethernet fabric switches are integral to the next-gen infrastructure that leverages VMware's Cloud Management Platform as the foundation for the new DWR software-defined data center. The VMware vCloud Suite® includes vRealize™ Automation™ and VMware vSphere®. Additionally, DWR utilized the VMware NSX™ network virtualization platform. Deployment of the solution took less than a day and was implemented by Enterprise Networking Solutions Inc., a VMware and Brocade partner, as part of a replacement project for a proprietary network architecture.

"We are continually striving to improve our overall data center economics and performance," said Tony Morshed, DWR chief technology officer. "Through the vCloud Suite, we have delivered the building blocks for the DWR self-service portal that enables the agency to achieve increased technology efficiency, agility and capacity."

"Organizations such as DWR are shifting the way they do business through a software-defined data center architecture," said Sajai Krishnan, vice president of product marketing, Cloud Management Business Unit, VMware. "With the VMware vCloud Suite overlaying next-gen IP infrastructure built with Brocade VDX Ethernet fabric switches, DWR now has a self-service portal that enables the agency to achieve increased IT efficiency, agility and control."

"By simplifying and automating network processes, the New IP encourages innovation and accelerates the speed of service delivery," said Jason Nolet, senior vice president, Switching, Routing and Analytics Products Group, Brocade. "Our VDX Ethernet fabric switches are optimized to seamlessly integrate with the vCloud Suite elements to create an ideal environment for the new DWR software-defined data center."