Brocade Data Center Repels Zombie Attack

Some of the “Zombies” that showed up on the Brocade campus.(Photo: Brocade)

Why are zombies always attacking data centers? We can only assume that it’s because their brain-eating habits direct them to the biggest brains they can find.

Zombies have featured in an exercise by the Google disaster recovery team, which tested its readiness with a scenario in which zombies invaded Georgia and sought to devour the brains of tech staff in their Atlanta data center. The data center teams at RagingWire and DataCave have also explored the zombie readiness of their facilities.

But none of these have gone as far as the team at Brocade, which has published several videos documenting a zombie attack on their corporate campus in San Jose, Calif. It turns out the networking vendor was having some fun with a customer request to test their network’s survivability from a Zombie Apocalypse. I guess we should be grateful they didn’t request a Dancing Zombie Apocalypse, or we might have wound up with another “Harlem Shake” video and a meme collision.

Jed Bleess, Director Strategic Solutions Lab at Brocade, explains that these are new species of Data Center Zombies that “hunt for networks seeking the data that courses through switches, the life-blood of a company, then ripping them apart to byte on the bits spurting out of a fatally wounded network.” Will it work on the Brocade VDX switch?

In an accompanying blog post, Brocade suggests the Data Center Zombies headed elsewhere for their dinner, using a Google map to offer an inside joke for folks familiar with the corporate geography of San Jose.

Here’s Part One:

Now here’s the second installment:

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About Rich Miller

Rich Miller is the founder and editor-in-chief of Data Center Knowledge, and has been reporting on the data center sector since 2000. He has tracked the growing impact of high-density computing on the power and cooling of data centers, and the resulting push for improved energy efficiency in these facilities.