Mike Harrison, Brocade, with John Furrier and Stu Miniman at IBM Edge 2014 @thecube #ibmedge Infrastructure is often only thought of in terms of the big picture, with little or no attention given to the fact that the whole is only as good as the sum of its parts. That reality is only now beginning to sink in among decision makers as industry efforts to decouple management functionality from the underlying hardware kick into high gear. Networking in particular has had a tendency of falling through the cracks in the past, but Mike Harrison, the vice president of Brocade’s IBM unit, sees that changing in the wake of the accelerating shift to software-driven operating paradigms. He dropped by SiliconANGLE’s theCUBE at Big Blue’s recently concluded Edge Summit to share how his company is collaborating with the technology stalwart to fit connectivity into the programmable data center puzzle. The need to unshackle transport capacity from the physical constraints that have historically complicated management and maintenance is becoming more pressing than ever before as result of the unprecedented disruption happening at the upper layers of enterprise stack, Harrison tells hosts John Furrier and Stu Miniman. He explains that the rapid increase in data from the Internet of Things and the new breed of applications developed in response to that growth are driving demand for both storage and compute capacity. As the glue that holds it all together, the network is naturally coming under increased pressure as well. “When you take the next logical step, it’s ‘well, what about provisioning that data from the target device that you just put it on … to get it back to the application demanding it.’ That’s where we come in,” Harrison remarks. “That’s where the infrastructure, from a networking standpoint, becomes critical in terms of what path and selection criteria you use.”